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Many issues have made their way through my office door - anxiety, psychotic thinking, depression and a variety of other mood disorders.  I learned much about management of these problems while I was in grad school, but, I was never offered a class in a new difficulty that is infecting our society today.  Gaming disorder.  It is being studied by the World Health Organization for inclusion in the list of mental health diagnoses and disorders.  Gaming disorder includes difficulty controlling the frequency, duration and intensity of playing games - often violent games - on the computer.  In general, it includes giving priority to computer communication such that it profoundly interferes with other, more personal, activities.     Gaming disorder often begins in childhood when parents become complacent about the results of children's' obsessive use of video games.  In many cases this obsessive use is leading to violent video addiction.  I am finding that parents who have a history of being abused more often allow their children to become part of the video rage audience.  Consequent escalating violent behavior on the part of children is reaching new heights.  An important study should involve concerns about whether violent children are attracted to brutal video games or whether there is a causal relationship between harsh video games and violent behavior.  Nevertheless, the connection is inescapable.  Violent behaviors are reaching new heights.     Obsession with video games suggests a question about whether we are moving from a personal, real world into a virtual world characterized by anger, aggressive behavior and out of control turbulence.  A common sense alert  tells us that if we continue marketing violent video games, we are encouraging dangerous, bad behavior.    Our computer use and video connections need more boundaries.  Now that impulsive computer use and computer gaming are becoming recognized as mental health afflictions,  our diagnostic thinking also has to recognize differences between irresistible impulses and impulses not resisted.  The first would indicate a mental health problem while the second could describe a problem with character.       In either of the above situations, we must have serious concerns about children who step from virtual worlds into a new reality where torturing and shooting people are acceptable ways of functioning.  Children with video addiction will not like restriction, but, total immersion into "commando parenting" involving a relationship between behavior and consequences must be of chief importance.  Remember that healthy boundaries lead to healthy behavior.

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