Love Playing Video Games? You Might Soon Be Diagnosed With A Mental Disorder
A whole 28 years after its last version, the World Health Organisation is on the way to updating its International Classification of Diseases (ICD). The current draft lists a number of new diseases, disorders, injuries and other related health conditions. One that definitely stuck out identified something WHO are calling “gaming disorder”.
The beta draft site says that this disorder is “characterised by a pattern of persistent or recurrent gaming behaviour”, and classifies it as a pattern of behaviour with “impaired control over gaming”. The disorder fulls under the parent category of “Disorders due to addictive behaviours”, and has its roots the giving of increased priority to gaming over other daily activities.
The move has already sparked a large debate online. As it stands, the current draft, apart from not being final, does not list prevention or treatment options. This has lead to the suggestion being already contested by various people, professors and gamers alike. However, others are saying new technologies like Virtual Reality will only make this classification even more vital.
WHO have preempted the whole thing by saying the actual classification has not been officially approved yet, but while the beta draft site is being updated on a daily basis, gaming disorder remains one of the main hot topics at the crux of this latest update.
Controversy aside, however, it seems like we’re on the way towards looking at people who love video games from a different perspective.
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