Functional impairment matters in the screening and diagnosis of gaming disorder

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.

• Publication year

  2017

• Venue

  Journal of Behavioral Addictions

• Publication date

  2017-06-27

• Fields of study

  Law, Medicine, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1556/2006.6.2017.036PMID 28816514PMCID 5700712
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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