Mother reveals struggle of having 15-year-old son diagnosed with ‘gaming disorder’
‘There is no outside world. It has become all-consuming’
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Your support makes all the difference.A mother has spoken out about her teenage son’s debilitating addiction to video games, after spending three years trying to have his condition officially recognised by the NHS.
Kendal Parmar, a mother of five from North London, revealed that watching her 15-year-old son gradually become more reliant on gaming during his adolescence has been a huge struggle.
Her son had been a very keen rugby and cricket player before his "gaming disorder" overwhelmed his entire life.
“Every moment he’s awake, he wants to be on a game,” Ms Parmar told The Telegraph.
“There is no outside world. It has become all-consuming.”
The World Health Organisation (WHO) announced plans in 2017 to classify addiction to video games as a mental health condition.
From today, people suffering from “gaming disorder”, as WHO describes it, will be able to receive free treatment for the condition on the NHS.
The gravity of Ms Parmar’s son’s addiction reached its peak when he had to become hospitalised due to ill-health.
“He was admitted to hospital for eight weeks because he was not functioning. I was really worried about him,” Ms Parmar said.
She explained that her son had been given medication to treat a deficiency in vitamin D, due to the extreme lack of time spent outdoors.
Ms Parmar had attempted to reduce her son’s dependency on video games by confiscating all of his digital devices and keeping them in a safe in her bedroom.
However, her son was able to work around her safeguarding measures and became aggressive if he was unable to find his phone and computers.
One of the biggest challenges of her son’s gaming disorder has been the way in which he isolates himself from the rest of the family, having previously been a very sociable person.
“He is estranged within our own house,” she said.
“We feel invisible to him. We have lost him… although we know he is in there.”
The WHO defines gaming disorder as a “pattern of gaming behaviour” in which “increasing priority is given to gaming over other activities to the extent that gaming takes precedence over other interests and daily activities.”
Symptoms of the condition have to have been evident for at least 12 months in order to be diagnosed.
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