Joël Billieux , 1 , 2 , 3 , * , Daniel L. King 4 , Susumu Higuchi 5 , Sophia Achab 6 , 7 , Henrietta Bowden-Jones 8 , Wei Hao 9 , Jiang Long 3 , 9 , Hae Kook Lee 10 , Marc N. Potenza 11 , John B. Saunders 12 , Vladimir Poznyak 13
27 June 2017
Journal of Behavioral Addictions
Internet gaming disorder, ICD-11, IGD, gaming disorder, diagnosis, functional impairment
This commentary responds to Aarseth et al.’s (in press) criticisms that the ICD-11 Gaming Disorder proposal would result in “moral panics around the harm of video gaming” and “the treatment of abundant false-positive cases.” The ICD-11 Gaming Disorder avoids potential “overpathologizing” with its explicit reference to functional impairment caused by gaming and therefore improves upon a number of flawed previous approaches to identifying cases with suspected gaming-related harms. We contend that moral panics are more likely to occur and be exacerbated by misinformation and lack of understanding, rather than proceed from having a clear diagnostic system.
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