{"id":1991,"date":"2018-06-11T12:09:20","date_gmt":"2018-06-11T08:09:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.uaebarq.ae\/en\/?p=1991"},"modified":"2018-06-11T12:09:20","modified_gmt":"2018-06-11T08:09:20","slug":"first-child-to-be-diagnosed-with-internet-addiction-by-the-nhs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.uaebarq.ae\/en\/2018\/06\/11\/first-child-to-be-diagnosed-with-internet-addiction-by-the-nhs\/","title":{"rendered":"First child to be diagnosed with Internet addiction by the NHS"},"content":{"rendered":"

A<\/span>\u00a015-year-old boy is set to be diagnosed with internet gaming addiction in what is believed to be the first case of its kind in the NHS.<\/p>\n

The teenager from North London has been off school for a year after becoming so addicted to gaming that he has lost confidence to leave his home.<\/p>\n

The decision represents a potential breakthrough for his mother Miss Kendal Parmar who has battled for three years for help and to have his condition recognised and treated by the NHS.<\/p>\n

It comes only months after the World Health Organisation (WHO) classified internet gaming as an official mental health disorder and brings hope to parents with children in a similar situation.<\/p>\n

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\u201cI call it a silent addiction,\u201d said Miss Parmar. \u201cIf you were shooting up in a park, everyone would care a lot more because it disrupts society. If he was drunk and driving a motorbike, everyone would care. But no-one cares if he is sitting in his bedroom.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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H<\/span>er son was a talented sportsman, captaining his county rugby and cricket teams, as well as being highly sociable and academically able, having secured a place in the stream for gifted pupils when he joined secondary school.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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I<\/span>t was then, however, his addiction with gaming started to take hold, turning him into a recluse in his own home. \u201cEvery moment he\u2019s awake, he wants to be on a game. There is no outside world. It has become all-consuming,\u201d said Miss Parmar, who co-founded Untapped AI which supports people online in work and at home.<\/p>\n

\u201cI knew it was addictive [at the beginning] when he was online instead of doing his homework. He started to be an addict and avoided the real world.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe has great mates [in other gamers online] and he is having fun running virtual worlds and non-existent kingdoms but it\u2019s not real. It\u2019s become so real that there\u2019s nothing outside it anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n

Miss\u00a0Parmar, a mother of five, believes she has tried everything to break his addiction including a safe in her bedroom to lock up his phone and computers and multiple parental control devices. \u201cHe is either aggressive or finds ways to outsmart all of them,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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T<\/span>he cost of private treatment, \u00a3350 a session, has not been possible and until now she has struggled to get the NHS to recognise it as a treatable condition. \u201cNo-one has taken it seriously at all. There isn\u2019t any treatment as it\u2019s so new and no-one understands it,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cHe was admitted to hospital for eight weeks because he was not functioning. I was really worried about him. When he came out, they said they had some medication for him. All it was was vitamin D tablets (to compensate for lack of sunlight) because he doesn\u2019t go outside.\u201d<\/p>\n

I<\/span>t is thought there are thousands of other young people with similar problems as new studies show 4% of adolescents are clinically at risk of internet addiction. One of Britain\u2019s leading experts on addiction told the Daily Telegraph he received a letter a week from parents desperate to know what to do with a child addicted to gaming.<\/p>\n

Miss Parmar said she sits with her son when he is on Twitch, a live streaming video platform owned by Amazon, to try to understand his addiction: \u201cIt is the buzz he gets from achieving levels in the games. He also loves the social side of it and the number of people you can play with.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe achievement thing is big in gaming. It used to be under the radar but it has become mainstream now for children.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s an enormous community of people watching people play \u2013 more than 100m play each month. Top streamers make more than $500,000 a month. I sat and watched just how many are on this, just watching people play for hours.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cWatching him with so many other gamers is like going into a pub and seeing all the other people drinking and having a good time. Some people can go into a pub and cope with it. But not an alcoholic.\u201d<\/p>\n

S<\/span>he had thought that he was the least likely of her five children to become an addict. \u201cHe was the most sociable. He used to walk into the playground and there wasn\u2019t a parent who didn\u2019t come over to him and ask him if he wanted to come round and play. He was charming,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

As a result, it has been hard for her and her other children to come to terms with it: \u201cThe biggest effect on our family is the isolation from us all. He is estranged within our own house. We feel invisible to him. We have lost him…although we know he is in there,\u201d said Miss Parmar.<\/p>\n

She has been supported by her sister Belinda Parmar, founder of Lady Geek, a firm set up to encourage more women into tech, who has also now launched The Truth about Tech to raise awareness about addiction and hold the gaming and social media companies to account.<\/p>\n

It was inspired by her experience of her own family\u2019s and other parents\u2019 troubled relationship with theirchildren over the use of technology. It provides support for parents including workshops.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cManaging technology is the number one issue in the homes of all the people in the workshops I run. We have lost control of that relationship with technology. We have become slaves to technology,\u201d said Belinda Parmar.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe fact that the NHS is not putting a section about it on its website shows the lack of understanding of that. That\u2019s what I am trying to change. I am trying to change awareness.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

–<\/p>\n

Telegraph<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A\u00a015-year-old boy is set to be diagnosed with internet gaming addiction in what is believed to be the first case of its kind in the NHS. The teenager from North London has been off school for a year after becoming so addicted to gaming that he has lost confidence to leave his home. The decision …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1992,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1991","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","","category-tech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uaebarq.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1991","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uaebarq.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uaebarq.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uaebarq.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uaebarq.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1991"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.uaebarq.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1991\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1993,"href":"https:\/\/www.uaebarq.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1991\/revisions\/1993"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uaebarq.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1992"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uaebarq.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1991"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uaebarq.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1991"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uaebarq.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1991"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}