Locked in their bedrooms, playing video games into the small hours, children as young as 10 years old are now addicted to their consoles. Tim Lewis hears how the compulsive games can be impossible to resist – and meets the experts tackling the issue
Dee had read a newspaper article about a new NHS National Centre for Gaming Disorders that was being set up; she made contact, but the service wasn’t taking on patients yet.
The story of Dee – and Jake, who agreed to be featured in this article, but preferred not to be interviewed – is depressingly familiar to Professor Henrietta Bowden-Jones OBE, the founder and director of the National Centre for Gaming Disorders.
In 2008, she founded the first National Problem Gambling clinic: the NHS now has the capacity to treat up to 3,000 patients a year in 15 centres across the UK based on Bowden-Jones’s methodology.
We sat in a grand, high-ceilinged room in Earl’s Court, which is also the current base for the gambling clinic, and discussed what form an article might take.
The centre, which had been set up with a plan to see all patients face-to-face in London, pivoted swiftly to video calls, which remains the format its therapy sessions still take.
Bowden-Jones has been pushing for urgent extra funding and the clinic has taken the difficult decision to pause family work: this has brought the assessment waiting time down from over a year to three months.
The original article contains 2,281 words, the summary contains 200 words. Saved 91%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Dee had read a newspaper article about a new NHS National Centre for Gaming Disorders that was being set up; she made contact, but the service wasn’t taking on patients yet.
The story of Dee – and Jake, who agreed to be featured in this article, but preferred not to be interviewed – is depressingly familiar to Professor Henrietta Bowden-Jones OBE, the founder and director of the National Centre for Gaming Disorders.
In 2008, she founded the first National Problem Gambling clinic: the NHS now has the capacity to treat up to 3,000 patients a year in 15 centres across the UK based on Bowden-Jones’s methodology.
We sat in a grand, high-ceilinged room in Earl’s Court, which is also the current base for the gambling clinic, and discussed what form an article might take.
The centre, which had been set up with a plan to see all patients face-to-face in London, pivoted swiftly to video calls, which remains the format its therapy sessions still take.
Bowden-Jones has been pushing for urgent extra funding and the clinic has taken the difficult decision to pause family work: this has brought the assessment waiting time down from over a year to three months.
The original article contains 2,281 words, the summary contains 200 words. Saved 91%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!