World Health Organisation is considering the games to be a disease as the players with these games become addict and they experience a hangover of what game they have started playing, all the time on their minds.
Anyone who has ever lost an hour engrossed in a famous and favourite of young and old people “Candy Crush”, can recognize that games have an addictive quality. But while it is easy to throw around the word “addicted”, excessive gaming can be a real and serious, as well as sometimes deadly condition that millions of people (particularly young people) suffer from, and now the World Health Organization is considering to officially recognize it as a disease.
When the case of addiction becomes severe, people with video game addiction put gaming above even their own wellbeing. People forget to bathe, sleep, or even to eat. Such kind of addiction can lead to depression and withdrawal symptoms, and those with the extreme gaming addicts have died from lack of sleep.
The WHO’s International Classification of Diseases (ICD) is similar to an encyclopedia of all known diseases, and it has become the diagnostic standard for health agencies across the world, that is used to monitor statistics and report on epidemiology.
ICD has updated nearly every year and the draft version for the current year does include for the first time, a listing for gaming addiction too.
Dubbed gaming disorder in the ICD, addiction has been described as a pattern of persistent or recurrent gaming behaviour that includes ‘impaired control over gaming, increasing priority that is given to gaming to the extent that gaming does take precedence on other life interests and routine activities; & continuation or escalation of gaming despite the occurrence of negative results.’
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This description does also note that the behavior must be so extreme that it is causing ‘significant impairment’ to the rest of the life –family, school, or work– of a person.
Though this is only the draft version, we can not say for sure that the WHO will include gaming addiction in final updates too.
But the point to note is that it has been recognized under the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
The manual has been published by the American Psychiatric Association that dies classify mental disorders, since the year 2013, so it is not as if the medical community does not already recognize the toll of this gaming disorder.
Those do not game may have trouble taking such a disorder seriously, but having it officially listed by the UN’s health organization will help more of you people to realize the danger, and it would allow more people to get help.
