Fight Video Game Addiction

  • by: Dan Bernardo
  • recipient: American Medical Association and American Psychiatric Association
Video game addiction has wrecked many lives. Help us spread awareness about the lives that video game addiction has harmed. We also hope to spread awareness of video game addiction to clinicians so that they may be better empowered to recognize video game addiction help those with video game addiction seek help and heal themselves.
For many, video games like World of Warcraft, have become an obsession and massive time-sink that prevents many among us from setting and accomplishing goals in real life. Video game addiction needs to be taken more seriously before it balloons into a more widespread and costly epidemic.

The main aim of this petition is to help spread awareness of the growing epidemic of video game addiction. We all know someone whose true potential has never been met because of video game addiction. By signing this petition and telling the story of your own addiction to video games or a loved one's addiction, we help spread the word so that a stronger community can be built. Sign it, tell your family about it, tell your friends about it -- video game addiction will not be taken seriously without the help and concern of everyone affected by it.

Another aim of this petition is to help make the American Psychiatric Association more aware of the breadth and danger of video game addiction so that it will recognize video game addiction as an official mental disorder. Despite the growing number of video gamers and the growing amount of time spent playing video games, at its 2007 annual meeting, the American Medical Association rejected a proposal to classify video game addiction as a mental disorder in the DSM IV, which is used by psychiatrists to diagnose mental disorders. This is unfortunate as video game addiction obviously causes social dysfunction and carries a great potential for addiction. Video game overuse shares many characteristics with pathological gambling and should be lumped under the same Impulse Control Disorders that pathological gambling was classified under in DSM IV. As video gaming continues to make headway into mainstream entertainment, we're bound to see more video game related deaths similar to the death of a Korean male in 2005 who died after playing StarCraft 50 hours straight. The medical community is making a huge mistake in ignoring this problem while in its infancy. We will request that the American Psychiatric Association acknowledge the video game addiction as a mental disorder in the DSM V.

For more info, or to help people with video game addiction, please visit wowaholics anonymous at http://www.wowaholics.org

Thank you.
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