Health Consequences of Gaming Disorder

China’s most famous esports player – Jian Zihao or ‘Mad Dog’ – recently retired from professional gaming at the age of 23, citing type 2 diabetes and other health problems resulting from a fatty diet, lack of physical activity and the high stress of continuous gaming (BBC News, 2020).

Mental health risks of high digital use

Negative mental health associations with problem gaming include hostility, depression, suicidal thoughts, social anxiety, poor emotional regulation and interpersonal conflict. In large-scale American surveys of over 14,000 respondents, teens who reported five hours or more of video games or digital use daily had a significantly higher risk of sadness, suicidal thoughts and suicide planning. The causal relationship of these associations are complex and require further investigation to unravel.

While researchers, psychologists and policy makers discuss the issue, millions of people are struggling with gaming disorder mental health problems. Individuals and families negatively impacted by gaming are seeking expert advice, and clinicians need to know how to help someone with video game addiction.

Co-morbidities and clinical implications

A lack of long-term studies on effective treatment modalities for gaming disorder have immediate implications for clinicians encountering gaming clients and their families who present with a wide range of associated negative symptoms (Zajak et al. 2020).

INTENTA’s Gaming Disorder Clinical Training outlines co-morbidities associated with problematic gaming and uses practical examples to address these co-morbidities in a clinical setting. When working with people who game problematically, clinicians must prioritize interventions according to the client’s needs.

For example, they need to take all suicidal ideation and comments seriously and develop a plan to address them. When working with a gaming client, suicide risk, social anxiety, extreme depression and debilitating anxiety need to be planned for in advance, prior to removing or limiting game time.

Anxiety and gaming addiction

Clinicians can use exploratory questions with clients to investigate the different consequences of their gaming and the needs these behaviors serve. Counselors may want to determine the sources of anxiety driving their clients to gaming.

For example, deriving a clinical history of how long they have had anxiety, what causes the anxiety to increase and what are the activities that decrease their anxiety other than gaming? Finding other activities can be a key source of intervention so these activities can be expanded on. When working with clients for whom alternate activities to gaming are non-existent, this is an area to explore in a therapy session.