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The internet is doing physical damage to our children who are addicted to gaming and social media

Dr Begent sees children who are suffering from physical symptoms of a gaming addiction - Blend Images
Dr Begent sees children who are suffering from physical symptoms of a gaming addiction - Blend Images
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A 10-year-old boy so addicted to video gaming he had to be treated in hospital for a distended bowel and bladder that ballooned out of his pelvis after he stopped going to the toilet. A 13-year-old who gets heart palpitations and dizziness every time he stands up, so unaccustomed is his body to moving around. A 14-year-old girl with a severe vitamin D deficiency because her growing teenage frame hardly ever sees the sun. Not to mention the scores of children so sleep deprived from gaming with other children in America until the small hours, that they can’t perform at school, can barely stay awake through a lesson. This is the reality families up and down the country are facing at the moment.

I started really noticing what was happening about five years ago. Slowly, more and more children and teenagers were being brought in to see me at University College Hospital in London by worried parents, presenting with complex physical issues such as breathlessness, exhaustion, or persistent headaches, for which there seemed no immediate explanation. Further examination, and questioning about their home life and day to day routine would reveal that the debilitating constipation the 12-year-old sitting next to them was suffering from had one major cause - the inactivity caused by the amount of time they were spending on the internet.

It’s why I am in support of the World Health Organisation’s decision to class gaming addiction as a mental health disorder. As an adolescent physician in a complex functional disorder service, I see the worst of the worst. Not every child who has a smartphone and an XBox is going to present with the kinds of extreme symptoms I see coming through my door. But I am in no doubt that there is also a grade of physical damage being done to our children because of the internet, and i would be very keen for there to be more research for us to understand the implications of this compelling issue properly.

As phenomenons in healthcare go, this is an unusual one. Unusual because technology is so fast-moving and unnatural in its progression, that it is incredibly difficult to hypothesise about the effects it is having on our society. Unusual, also, because the people it is affecting most (the young) are being protected, treated, weaned off this thing which captivates every fibre of their attention, by adults who don’t know the extreme social pressure of being in a ’streak’ on Snapchat or on a Fortnite mission.

Obesity, type two diabetes, severe sleep deprivation, behavioral problems (which in some extreme cases could even be caused by poor brain development) - they are all symptoms of modern life, but when they are presenting in 10-year-olds, we need to think again - Credit: Click&Boo 
Obesity, type two diabetes, severe sleep deprivation, behavioral problems (which in some extreme cases could even be caused by poor brain development) - they are all symptoms of modern life, but when they are presenting in 10-year-olds, we need to think again Credit: Click&Boo

Because that’s what it is for some children, it’s an addiction. It isn’t just social media which has them hooked (though that is a major culprit). I’ve even seen kids get hooked to Wikipedia. They will click through and through and through from page to page. You can pick your poison with the internet, you see, but to your brain it’s all the same. You shoot someone successfully on a violent video game, someone likes your picture on Instagram, you get chatting to someone on Facebook, you get into a game with someone on the other side of the world on your computer - in every case, small doses of dopamine are released in your brain, and that can quickly hook you in.

It’s the same effect as you might find with an addictive drug. From what I’ve witnessed, the physical symptoms can be as significant, and the burden it puts on the health service is growing. Obesity, type two diabetes, severe sleep deprivation, behavioral problems (which in some extreme cases could even be caused by poor brain development) - they are all symptoms of modern life, but when they are presenting in 10-year-olds whose days should still consist of running around and then getting a good night’s sleep, we need to think again.

A lot of parents do a great job but as a doctor, I see the kind of pressure that parents are under. They may be watching their children becoming more emotionally withdrawn, and less physically well, all because of the mobile phone they were given for their 11th birthday, it is hard to watch. Of course, some children will be more likely to spend too much time on the internet because of difficulties in their home lives. But for many parents, it can be very difficult to know how best to cope with a child who has become so addicted to a videogame that they become violent when it is taken away from them. I have known middle class families where the parents have been threatened with knives when they’ve tried to get their children offline.  Taking technology away at night is vital, but an addicted kid can be pretty devious and make it incredibly hard for well meaning parents to get it right despite the very best of intentions.

Do you need to go cold turkey, do you need to be weaned off it slowly and in a controlled way, or is that so impossible that you simply need to figure out how to make it a healthy part of your life? The truth is that the internet is everywhere now. We need it, that is simply how our lives are these days, and we also have to hold on to the huge educational and social benefits of technology. But we don’t yet have a full picture of what the effects of technology are on this generation, and what we’re seeing on the front line of treatment already is pretty thought provoking.

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It would be too simplistic to simply take it off them - technology is woven through so many aspects of their lives - however, we can keep an open dialogue with them, we can empower them to use it well, to develop healthy relationships with is like we do with food, we can try to give them enough resilience not to fall into its traps, and we can seek medical and psychological help when it becomes too much for us to handle alone. But parents alone cannot stop this phenomenon.

As doctors, we have to treat the physical and emotional symptoms of what has become a national health concern, and like any other national health issue, the government, and the companies that manufacture this technology must take some responsibility. With food, we have the FDA to check everything for quality. But at the moment the internet has no real mechanism for managing its effect on our health, even though the symptoms are there to see. The WHO says that their decision to make gaming addiction a disorder is based in the fact that an addiction by its very definition is a pattern of persistent behaviour so severe it "takes precedence over other life interests". This is what a small but significant number of our children are suffering from.

In many ways, the internet is like food. You can’t say you don’t need it, because we do. There are bits of it which are essential to our lives now, bringing variety, spice and richness, but there are bits of it that are extremely bad for us. We now understand, for example, how incredibly addictive sugar is, and the government is taking steps to mitigate against that. Without a proper technology regulator, people are allowed to put as much sugar into the internet as they possibly can. At some point, somebody needs to start taking the sugar out of the internet. Our children’s health may be at stake.