|
|
Endless hours logged into poker, obsessed with the latest video game: Your child isn't playing - he may have a very serious addiction, and now doctors want to help
October 22, 2008 at 9:10 AM EDT
Angelika Crisp would wake in the middle of the night to hear her son, Brandon, speaking into his headset as he feverishly played Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, a popular online video game.
She and her husband, Steve, are sure Brandon had become addicted to the game and link its appeal to the 15-year-old's disappearance from their Barrie, Ont., home on Oct. 13. "He is obsessed with Call of Duty - it has been a constant battle for the last two years," she told The Globe and Mail this week. Last night, investigators ramped up their national search for the youth and considered the possibility he is trying to survive in the wilderness.
The kind of obsessive online behaviour reported by Brandon's parents is what prompted clinicians at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto to launch Canada's first holistic clinic specifically designed to treat adolescents addicted to gambling, the Internet and video games.
The Adolescent Clinical Education Service, dubbed ACES by clinical head Bruce Ballon, was launched last month and seeks to propel youth addiction treatment into the 21st century by acknowledging that video games and the Internet can be just another escape route for young people battling mental health issues such as social anxiety, depression or low self-esteem.
Related Articles
"We started getting tons of calls [from parents complaining] about Internet use and we got tired of saying, 'Oh we don't deal with that,' " Dr. Ballon said. "Instead, we said, 'Let's deal with it,' because it's just another manifestation or coping mechanism or strategy to deal with other issues."
Dr. Ballon, a child psychiatrist, and Joanna Henderson, a psychologist and researcher, both with the youth addiction program at CAMH, currently see eight patients on a regular basis and are receiving more and more referrals. All of their patients are between the ages of 16 and 24, but Dr. Ballon says he wants to include teens as young as 14, as they too are running into tech troubles or gambling addiction.
The problem with diagnosing online addictive behaviours, Dr. Ballon says, is that patients typically mask concurrent disorders that may have been bubbling below the surface since childhood and could be fuelling some of the reasons behind the addiction. Identifying those issues is key to treating ACES patients who become addicted to online gambling, interactive video games or eBay. Some may have Asperger syndrome, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder or learning disabilities and not even know it, Dr. Ballon says. Many of the patients he's seen have severe social anxiety and post-traumatic stress issues.
Dr. Ballon views the program as a gateway to solving these concurrent problems one step at a time - once the patient gets in the door, he or she has access to treatment from other services that CAMH provides.
While an Internet and video-game addiction rehab in the Netherlands has its patients going cold turkey, that's not something Dr. Ballon plans to enforce. If a patient wants to be abstinent, the doctor will help with that, but most youth don't want to, he says.
"The Internet is so ubiquitous now. [Most would want to] gradually cut down on their use, then we'd ask, 'How is your life getting better?' "
Problems with gambling, the Internet and video games often seep into one another, he points out. One youth Dr. Ballon knows became addicted to a video game in which he had to buy magic stones at $7 a pop to ramp up his character's powers. Soon the youngster was buying them with abandon, and became sucked into an interactive world. While more young people and their families are seeking treatment for Internet and gaming addictions, there's news on the flipside: Recent studies have found video games can be good for kids.
Researchers from Fordham University in New York found that playing video games can improve cognitive and perceptual skills. But if parents aren't connecting with their children at an early age, addiction can become a problem as kids reach adolescence, says Cris Rowen, a pediatric occupational therapist and sensory specialist in Sechelt, B.C.
"Technology has hit us like a bomb; the rapidity with which technology is advancing, we can't even describe it from a research perspective," she says. "Children are disconnecting from themselves, from others, from nature, and that disconnect ... is resulting in what I can only describe as the perfect storm."
She agrees with the approach CAMH is taking and applauds its efforts to dig up the real issues from beneath the addictions.
Last night, as he awaited news on the whereabouts of his son, Mr. Crisp highlighted the risk of parents letting teens live in a constantly wired world.
"Now they have TVs in their room, laptops in their room, access to the Internet through wireless. And herein lies the problem," he said. "You can't turn your kid off now."
*****
Red flags of addiction
Grades are slipping.
He or she is becoming socially insular.
Your teen is stealing PIN
and credit-card numbers and
pretending to be an adult online.
They refuse to tell you what they're doing online for hours and hours. |
|
发表于 2008-10-23 09:01
