Gaming disorder and its treatment

This chapter provides a brief overview of gaming disorder (GD) and its treatment. There are now over twenty different screens for assessing problematic gaming although relatively few have used nationally representative samples. The prevalence rates in these nationally representative studies have ranged from 1.2 percent to 8.5 percent depending upon country and screening instrument used. There have been a number of studies describing treatment of GD, although many of these tend not to distinguish between Internet Use Disorder and GD. In terms of treatment for GD, both psychological and pharmacological approaches have been adopted. More specifically, psychological treatment using a cognitive-behavioral framework (CBT) appears to be the most widely used. Furthermore, pharmacological treatment using opioid receptor antagonists, antidepressants, antipsychotics, opioid receptor antagonists, and psychostimulants has been reported in the literature. It is concluded that standardized and comprehensive methods of diagnosis are at present lacking, and that further research into GD is needed from clinical, epidemiological, cross-cultural, and neurobiological perspectives of GD.