Kendal Parmar’s son went from being a sporty and sociable boy who loved school, to a child who would stay in his room and rarely go outside.

The change in his personality was down to a gaming disorder that crept up on him at the age of 12, when he started secondary school. Three years later, Joseph is still struggling with the problem.

Parmar says the biggest sign that something was wrong was the amount of arguing that would occur when she asked him to stop playing video games. “Eventually his habits developed and he was gaming all the time. He became too terrified to go to school and he was terrified of people,” she says.

Parmar was forced to take drastic measures to stop her son from going online, including removing the door from his bedroom. She also put the internet router in a locked safe so her son could not override the parental controls that stopped him accessing the internet.

The problem reached breaking point when Joseph was admitted to hospital for eight weeks because he was forgetting to eat and wash, and simply not functioning. The teenager, now aged 15, has been absent from school for a year.



Although this is an extreme example, Joseph is not alone. Amanda said her problems started when she took up Call of Duty, aged 18, to help cope with anxiety and depression. “It was sad that I didn’t notice how I soon replaced the people I actually knew in life for others online, due to gaming ability. I never noticed the time of night and somehow felt this urge that I couldn’t stop playing yet,” she says.



The 25-year-old adds: “These games did help me in a way but if I didn’t have someone willing to pull me away ... I would’ve closed myself off from the world more as I was already doing it.”

Despite the growing number of reports of people having difficulties, the scale of gaming addiction is not yet known. Experts have urged caution, however, at over-sensationalising the problem, saying that only a small minority who will be affected.

Henrietta Bowden-Jones is a psychiatrist and the founder of the first NHS-funded internet addiction centre, which is preparing to open in an London hospital and will initially focus on gaming.

She said: “We are not saying this is an epidemic but there will be people with this disorder who need treatment ... We will only know the scale of the issue and whether it is changing and worsening when we start having relevant prevalence surveys. There should be one every two years.”

The topic has gained attention in recent weeks after gaming disorder was classified by the World Health Organization as a mental health disorder.

There are some final hurdles to overcome in order for the NHS-funded internet addiction centre to start offering treatment, but the plan is for it to be part-financedresearch grants and philanthropic sources. Currently, the only help available in the UK is through private clinics.

Dr Richard Graham, a consultant in adolescent psychiatry at the Nightingale Hospital in London, welcomes the move but says any help that is offered should involve a broad approach.

“I have moved away from the digital detox restriction model to something that is more understanding of a young person’s desire to thrive in a digital economy ... [Any centre that is set up] is a good thing as long as it’s not about striving to squeeze an extraordinary unprecedented phenomena into a simplistic model.”

Peter Gray, a developmental psychologist at Boston College, advised caution about creating a moral panic around video gaming. “For the great majority, video gaming is a healthy, enjoyable, brain-building activity ... For some very small percentage of players, excessive gaming can become a problem.”

He added: “As a society we have tended to pathologise video gaming, and this has already created something of a moral panic. Already children are banned from public spaces without adults because we believe we are protecting them from dangers in that way. Now an increasing number of parents are are also banning children from video gaming, thereby depriving them of one of the few forms of play still available to them.”

But this view is not shared by Amanda, who has experienced gaming addiction, and she feels that there is not enough awareness about the problem. She believes that more support should be offered through schools.

After a three-year battle for a diagnosis for her son, Parmar sees the internet addiction centre as a glimmer of hope. Despite reports that her son would be the first child to be diagnosed with a gaming disorder after recent WHO changes, her local NHS trust said it did not have enough guidance to determine this.



Parmar described this news as “very disappointing” and says she has been emailing the trust for years trying to get them to pay attention to gaming disorder. “There does appear to be no treatment on the NHS,” she says.



Parmar is now getting support for her son through a woman she describes as a gamer and coach, who is helping her son prepare for therapy. It is going well and her son has had his first home schooling session.

“She is getting my son to talk about it and acknowledge it,” Parmar says. “When my son came out of hospital all they gave him was vitamin D tablets to compensate for a lack of sunlight as he didn’t go outside.”

Parmar says that while she believes only a small proportion of young people are going to become addicts, problematic gaming will only get worse unless more help is available.

“For my son, I believe we are beginning to see a chink of light coming through ... I am also confident that this attention will bring specialist help and by that I mean people who have succeeded in treating such an extreme addiction to gaming.”

Names have been changed