There is increasing talk about Addictions to gaming and the internet especially after the recent announcement of a new unit in a London hospital designed to cater for this group.

In fact there is a lot of confusion in general about what the problem is and what the right treatment is.

PROMIS has always been famous for understanding the complex interrelations between addictive processes and especially behavioural addictions ( like Gambling for example ) We were treating Gambling addiction 25 years ago, for example, and we took our first patient in for residential treatment of their computer/gaming/internet addiction more than 10 years ago, so we have some experience here.

To understand this area the first thing we need to establish is what is the addictive process. Unfortunately a lot of commentators and clinicians are so old that they just don’t understand the social and cultural revolution that IT  and the internet have brought.

In too much of the commentary there seems to be confusion and a good deal of hysteria. Centuaries ago, when people thought the world was flat, people would look out to the horizon, an area they knew little about, and speculate that “There be Dragons!”. We see a fair bit of this when it comes to talk of intenet and gaming addiction.

IT and the internet, in and of themselves, are not addictive. In the same way that gambling food work and exercise are not addictive. This is not to say that people don’t become terribly addicted to them, of course they do, but t is their addictive nature that is the problem, rather than the process they are engaged in.

It might be easier to illustrate with ccCe with alcohol. 2/3 of the population drink only 5% of the alcohol consumed. So the normal thing to do is to drink very little. Looking at the at the other way around you can see that 95% of the alcohol is drunk by 1/3 of the population and roughly 50% of the alcohol is drunk by 1/10 of the population. I hope this illustrates that it isn’t alcohol that is the problem, but people who have an addictive tendency towards it.