Is Compulsive Gambling an Addiction?

AMA Won't Call Compulsive Gaming 'Addictive'
June 25, 2007


There's not enough evidence to suggest that compulsive video-game playing rises to the level of addiction as with alcohol or other drugs, according to the American Medical Association (AMA).

Reuters reported June 24 that an AMA panel dropped a proposal to include video game addiction in the American Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).

"There is nothing here to suggest that this is a complex physiological disease state akin to alcoholism or other substance abuse disorders, and it doesn't get to have the word addiction attached to it," said Stuart Gitlow of the American Society of Addiction Medicine and Mt. Sinai School of Medicine in New York.

The proposal was debated at the recent AMA annual meeting in Chicago. The study panel recommended that the issue of video-game addiction be revisited when the next revision of the DSM is due, in five years.

Some doctors argued strongly for inclusion of video-game addiction. "Working with this problem is no different than working with alcoholic patients. The same denial, the same rationalization, the same inability to give it up," said Thomas Allen of the Osler Medical Center in Towson, Md.