All that action from those video games might be getting to your head, researchers claim.
Video game addiction heightens mental issues in children, a new study suggests. The two-year study examined 3,000 school age children, with one in ten of them being classified as a video game addict. Some of them were prone to behavioral issues, and in some instances the video games intensified them.
“When children became addicted, their depression, anxiety, and social phobias got worse, and their grades dropped,” Douglas A. Gentile, one of the researchers from Iowa State University, said. “When they stopped being addicted, their depression, anxiety, and social phobias got better.”
The American Medical Association has yet to classify video game addiction as a mental disorder and the greater community sees gaming as a hobby or a form of entertainment. However, Gentile believes that parents and providers should being more to combat the way that video games have an effect on children’s minds.
“We tend to approach it as ‘just’ entertainment, or just a game, and forget that entertainment still affects us,” he told Reuters . “In fact, if it doesn’t affect us, we call it ‘boring!'”