Shin (14), a middle school student in Daegu has been addicted to gaming for years. He stayed up all night in his room playing games. He was always late for school, and his friends teased him, calling a “game otaku(maniac)”. Shin blamed himself for being “someone unnecessary.” Late last year, he was diagnosed with severe depression and tried to be admitted to a psychiatric ward at a university hospital, but there were no vacancies, and he was only admitted this month.
“The 30 closed wards at Severance Hospital, which used to house adult schizophrenia patients, are now filled with teens and 20s,” Shin Yee-jin, a professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at Severance Hospital, said on Jan. 29. “Most of them have become so depressed that they have attempted self-harm and suicide.”
The number of teens and 20s suffering from depression, self-harm and other mental illnesses is on the rise. According to the National Health Insurance Corporation, there were 13,303 psychiatric hospitalizations for teens and 20s in 2017, or 14.6% of all patients. But last year, the number rose to 16,819 (22.2%), an increase of nearly 10 percentage points in five years.
Games have become so dialed in on pressing all kinds of dopamine buttons, a lot of adults can’t regulate their gaming habits.
There’s a lot of exploitative mechanics that have no point beyond fiddling with people’s hind brains that could be outlawed at a governmental level.
Beyond that, I agree, parents need to stay on top of their kids, as they always have. But video games along with tech in general has become a way to make a kid keep to themselves for hours, so they don’t bother you, and a lot of parents are taking this easy way out, at the expense of the development of the child.