WTF - Parents pay £22,000 to cure gaming addiction

Fretwired

This is published in tomorrow's Times [fast becoming an up-market version of the Daily Mail] - behind a pay wall so read away:

Children as young as 11 are being treated for addiction to computer games, which can cause mood swings, a sense of isolation and physical pain from repetitive small movements. Some children have even threatened their parents with knives when their games have been taken away from them.

Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto and other games can hook players in for as much as 20 hours a day, according to Oliver Clark, who runs a counselling service called ADT Healthcare.

However, counsellors have warned of a growing gap between poor families who cannot find clinics for under-16s, and rich parents who can afford private courses costing up to £22,000 each.

Mr Clark said that he took about ten calls a day from families struggling with gaming addiction. “Many addicts are children, but there aren’t a lot of clinics that are licensed for people under 16,” he said. “There’s no treatment on the NHS so we have to send them to private clinics that charge up to £4,500 a week.” Treatment can last 16 weeks, but the most common courses are a four-week programme that costs £18,000, or a six-week course that costs £22,000.

The lack of resources for treating what is a growing problem has driven some parents to send their children to boot camps in the US.

The Priory Hospital in Roehampton, southwest London, used by famous former addicts including Pete Doherty and Paul Gascoigne, offers treatment for “internet addiction”, the most common causes of which are pornography and online role-playing games.

Alexander Yellowlees, medical director and consultant psychiatrist at its eponymous sister hospital in Glasgow, has previously warned of his “increasing alarm” at the number of young people turning their backs on friends and family to play computer games.

Concern about time lost to games is at least 20 years old, but the ubiquity of simple, highly addictive computer games on portable devices has made the problem more pervasive.

Steven Noel-Hill, a former gaming addict who now works as a counsellor, warned that the availability of apps for the price of a pint of beer would lead to a rise in suicides. “These people will wake up one day and realise they have no qualifications and no social skills to form relationships,” he said.

Although this made be smile:

A grandmother who queued past midnight last week to buy Call of Duty: Ghosts, has staked a claim to be Britain’s oldest gamer. Doreen Fox, 78, a retired cleaner and widow, said: “I just love the violence of it, it keeps me focused. I suffered two strokes in 2008 and things like this keep me on my toes.” She spends hours playing on her Xbox in her flat in Dudley in the West Midlands, and says that she started playing computer games on her grandson Gareth’s Nintendo in the 1980s. Mrs Fox, who also enjoys knitting and gardening, added: “I’m not as quick as I used to be. I always shoot the wrong man but I don’t mind, I enjoy it anyway.”

Antique_Guitars

Lol at the last paragraph!

I once knew a woman whose teenage son was addicted to games and would go pretty ballistic if she tried to stop him  playing etc etc but as soon a he got a bit older (past puberty) things pretty much changed and  I think he was more interested in girls and  other things. Seems like the kid is fairly normal these days from what I have seen.