"Fortnite is a Mental Illness" - Man-Child Consultation # 1
I'm incredibly late to the party on this one and probably have no business spouting off my nerdy man child nonsense, but I'm doing it anyway. For those who have seen my latest YouTube video, you will know that my stance on the World Health Organization's decision to call Gaming Addiction a "mental health disorder" was that the entire decision was filled with mainstream media bias, barely any credible evidence to back up the idea that it is a mental disorder, and no consistency between diagnosing various addictions compared to this one. The large majority of the gaming community has as much backlash behind this decision as I do, but I have to ask a very serious question? What will this do to the overall gaming experience?
Let's be honest here. Most of the time, the mainstream media is ALWAYS trying to take a stab at the gaming community, mostly for the reasons of "claiming" that they are a bad influence on young teens/kids and can affect them in a detrimental way. Here's the problem though.
In my video, I mentioned how the majority of kids/teens/adults that are suffering from serious "gaming addiction" did it to themselves or were allowed to do it without any major consequence. Formations of bad habits/bad parenting can cause addictions like this to happen.
YOUR kid acting out in YOUR home is not the video game's fault. It is YOUR responsibility as a parent to nurture and discipline your own child. If you don't want you child on GTA 5...(Well, you shouldn't have given little Johnny GTA 5 in the first place, but) take it away from them/limit their time on the game. It genuinely boggles my mind that someone like Doctor Phil has to remind parents that they are in charge of their own children. That both astonishes and terrifies me.
Adults suffering from this issue are an entirely different story, however. That is caused by a bad habit formation. It happens with drug addicts, alcoholics, gamblers, social media addicts, etc. The best way to make sure not to fall into addiction is to limit your consumption of that substance, object, etc. EARLY.
Now, yes. One could argue that video game addiction can be caused by someone having a prior mental illness and making them obsessive and compulsive. But that does not inherently make video game addiction a mental health disorder. That just means thw addiction itself was rooted in a person's prior mental state BEFORE having gotten hooked.
Some individuals do indeed suffer heavily from this addiction and should definitely seek help. I won't deny that. But when you start taking it to these extreme heights in order to fill your own confirmation bias/eliminate video games off the face of the earth, that's when you lose me.
So, I'll leave you with this: Gambling disorder is still classified as a BEHAVIORAL problem, while gaming is classified as a MENTAL problem...just think about that...
If you haven't see my video on it, I highly encourage you to watch it after reading this post: https://youtu.be/ptZKX6vEIdo
With that being said, this has been TSV...
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