Gaming Teens Are Ending Up In Rehab
The latest news is that more and more school children around the world are spending so much time playing online 
games that they are actually being sent to rehabilitation centers. This may be due to the factor that many children will play online games as opposed to doing homework and other activities which teenagers generally do. One of the first teenagers to have received treatment is currently in residing at Sydney’s Rivendell Adolescent Unit where he currently is receiving therapy and doing his school work at the same time.
Schools have become seriously concerned due to the factor that many children are falling asleep during class due to spending so many hours online the night before playing computer games. Last year the first place for internet addicts opened up in Washington State. They took in a teenager who was addicted to gaming but was an obsessive player of World Of War craft.
It has been claimed by various mental health experts that many teens in Australia are going to need rehabilitation. There are children who are spending over fifty hours at a time playing games online, with barely stopping to go to the toilet. The common age of children who are experiencing addicts with regard to the internet are between the ages of 14 and 17 but this is happening to all ages as well, this is just the common recognized age group.
According to Rivendell psychiatrist Dr Philip Tam:”"They can’t stop playing. The longest I’ve had is a teenage schoolboy playing 37 hours non-stop with only toilet breaks.”, “It’s analogous to severe gambling. An increasing number of psychologists are treating people.”
Psychiatrists are currently in the process of developing a scale which is used in order to measure the level of a person’s computer addiction. It has been discovered that up to ten percent of computer users actually met the criteria for addiction. Only time will tell what will happen, but online gaming in teenagers is not something to play with.
