Chicago – The telltale signs are ominous: teens holing up in their rooms, ignoring friends, family, even food and a shower, while grades plummet and belligerence soars.
The culprit isn’t alcohol or drugs. It’s video games, which for certain kids can be as powerfully addictive as heroin, some doctors contend.
A leading council of the nation’s largest doctors’ group wants to have this behavior officially classified as a psychiatric disorder, to raise awareness and enable sufferers to get insurance coverage for treatment.
In a report prepared for the American Medical Association’s annual policy meeting starting Saturday in Chicago, the council asks the group to lobby for the disorder to be included in a widely used mental illness manual published by the American Psychiatric Association. AMA delegates could vote on the proposal as early as Monday.
Video game makers scoff at the notion that their products can cause a psychiatric disorder. Even some mental health experts say labeling the habit a formal addiction is going too far.
The current manual was published in 1994; the next edition is to be completed in 2012.
Up to 90 percent of American youngsters play video games and as many as 15 percent of them may be addicted, according to data cited in the AMA council’s report.
Joyce Protopapas of Frisco, Texas, said her son, Michael, 17, was a video addict. Over nearly two years, video and Internet games transformed him from an outgoing, academically gifted teen into a reclusive manipulator who flunked two classes and spent hours day and night playing World of Warcraft.
“My father was an alcoholic … and I saw exactly the same thing” in Michael, Protopapas said.
“We battled him until October of last year,” she said. “We went to therapists, we tried taking the game away.”
Last fall, the family found a therapist who “told us he was addicted, period.”
They sent Michael to a therapeutic boarding school, where he has spent the past six months at a cost of $5,000 monthly that insurance won’t cover, his mother said.
