South Korea Discovers StarCraft Addiction Drug
- Thread starter Tom Goldman
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Alright, alright, go beddy by Rooty, sorry for keeping you up. Just remember, it's a friendly discussion, nothing more.The_root_of_all_evil said:
Counter-Counter: The chemicals released when playing games, or gambling, or whatever, etc... is the same as having a substance alter your brain, just the brain altering itself.
That is completely true, addiction does depend on the person's well being. But that is like saying "If he didn't stick his foot in crap he would have stuck it in something else," that's not the point. If it wasn't the game, it could be anything else. But in this case it is the game.
Sorry if I'm keeping you up, just want a discussion.
[sup]Plus, you never call home, what's the deale-o![/sup]
I just had a disturbing image of a guy screaming "I WANT MORE HUGS!".......
I completely agree with you in this, it does depend on the person. If we're going into OCD and Addiction definitions, I have no idea what's what, but personally I'd classify severe OCD as an addiction anyway.
Then again, "personally" doesn't get the research grants.
I think we're disagreeing about agreeing about disagreeing about agreeing. Or something like that, I get what you're trying to say but I don't agree with how you're saying it if that makes sense.
While I did say that Video Game "addiction" (whateverthehell you want to call it) is very serious, I don't mean it as the "MOST SINGLE IMPORTANT ADDICTION EVAR" kind of way. It's serious for many people, yes, but obviously we have to take care of the addictions that give us street crime and gang shootouts first.
I apologize if I'm coming off as a little slow, but I'm not seeing what you're getting at. Alcohol can slowly kill your liver or whatever, yet you drink it when you're depressed and need to escape or in victory when you're partying, and your brain releases the endorphin thingamajigs. By "physically" do you mean affecting the body physically? 'Cause if that's the case, then playing games long enough can easily cause fatigue, negligence, and all sorts of stuff bad for the body.
Again, this is just a friendly discussion, if you want we can continue this via PM if necessary.
I took buproprion (aka Wellbutrin) for about a year, prescribed for depression and social anxiety..
At 150 mg twice a day, I bought a whole new wardrobe and started dating 6 women within the first three months after I started it. Before that, I barely ever had a date.
So I thought maybe I was on a little too much, and cut the dose to 150 mg a day. That seemed just right. I was much more outgoing and friendly on just the 150mg. I'm like: "so THIS is what it is like to be normal."
After a year it was like "okay been there done that" and I've been my usual old self ever since. I'll tell you that I did stop biting my finger nails while on it. I was playing a lot of Battlezone online back then so I don't think it was much of a cure in that regard.
But that was my little adventure with manipulating brain chemistry. I'm glad I gave it a try.
At 150 mg twice a day, I bought a whole new wardrobe and started dating 6 women within the first three months after I started it. Before that, I barely ever had a date.
So I thought maybe I was on a little too much, and cut the dose to 150 mg a day. That seemed just right. I was much more outgoing and friendly on just the 150mg. I'm like: "so THIS is what it is like to be normal."
After a year it was like "okay been there done that" and I've been my usual old self ever since. I'll tell you that I did stop biting my finger nails while on it. I was playing a lot of Battlezone online back then so I don't think it was much of a cure in that regard.
But that was my little adventure with manipulating brain chemistry. I'm glad I gave it a try.
Jay-zeus, 150mg? When I was on medication I only had 5mg, though that amount still affected me well enough. Now I've just stopped weening off, and aside from being a bit more pissy than usual for a while, I'm fine.Fearzone said:
That's my adventure with brain chemistry, and I am glad I took it when I needed to. Though if you needed 150mg, it must have been intense, my heart's out for you, man.
Anyone else think even if they're "cured" it's going to be REALLY easy for them to relapse? All they have to hear is three words: NUCLEAR LAUNCH DETECTED and it's back to net for them. Should've just used resocalization instead. Of course then you need to watch out for ghosts and Protoss.
Different meds have different potencies. 150 mg of Wellbutrin (buproprion) is a small dose--150 mg twice a day is a fairly typical starting dose, but seemed to affect me stronger than it does most people. So, I'm not a total whack job! Cheers!Jumplion said:
I understand that, but a lot of drugs that help with mental or emotional disease have to be taken for the rest of the person's life or until it is actually determined that the disease has ceased its own effect. But unless this person is interred in a facility or even incarcerated, they have no one to really go to besides themself to know that they should continue. Many will go through their current prescription, decide they feel fine and not renew when they should actually continue regardless of how they feel. Then the cycle just starts all over again.Nalgas D. Lemur said:
But this is dealing with extreme cases of actual schizophrenia, psychosis, and other disorders. Addiction can be counted as a disorder especially where alcohol and drugs are concerned, but I have my doubts that addiction to a game actually requires or can even be accurately treated by a drug. Especially when that same drug might cause other and even worse problems for the individual.
I think you can sense I have a strong distrust of drugs, and that is true. In reading this article it just seems to be treated as a shortcut, like nobody in Korea wants to bother to actually take a break from their computers.
And that's horrible.
True story this.The_root_of_all_evil said:
I was on anti depressants once (2 diff types) and they messed me up like seriously. As in making me alot WORSE I was close to suicide I was crying all night like a little girl.
I stopped taking them and got better through cognitive behavioural self therapy.
my life was SERIOUSLY interuppted and I've been set back a long time on my career path.
These chemicals can seriously harm your health, more than they help it, and DEFINATELY change your mood/behaviour/functioning, but this is my own personal experience, seek medical advice is you are depressed, ask for an alternative to pharmaceuticals perhaps if there is one availaible
as cliche as it sounds tetrahydracannibinol and cannabidyol in the right mixes is the only thing thats worked for me so far but there are alot of downsides to that too
its funny when illegal drugs>real drugs at treating certain medical conditions yet everyone fears that illegal drug through years of misinformation and propaganda and will do anything to keep it illegal despite the benefits said substance may bring to millions of people, because of the warped inexperienced,fearful perspective they have.
This news is not good new imo, alot of people will suffer, those who are misdiagnosed with a gaming addiction could end up with detrimental effects to their mental health cos everyone is pushing big pharma
Indeed. I propose a new study!ShadowKirby said:
Gratuitous amounts of sex - can it cure the Starcraft addiction?
Assuming the study proves successful, we can move on to studying the effects of same treatment as a prevention method to Starcraft 2 addiction. Or Mafia 2 addiction. Or whatever the hell else we can think of as a reason to apply that treatment.
Any volunteers?
Well, the idea is to have them keep checking in with their doctor on a semi-regular basis and to get their family members or whoever else on board with the whole thing. If you do just leave people entirely to themselves, yes, you're definitely more likely to run into that problem. A good doctor (or social worker, or whoever happens to be in charge of managing treatment) and a patient who's serious about trying to avoid that will have some kind of plan in place to deal with it preemptively, though, through education and various resources. It can't solve it completely, but it does help.samsonguy920 said:
I don't have a particular trust or distrust of them. To me, they're just tools. I'm rather familiar with a lot of them, how they work, what they're used for and why, what's good and bad about them, and so on. That said, do I think that game addiction requires medication? No, certainly not in all cases. Probably not in most. Likely not even in many. It's always useful to have another tool available, though.samsonguy920 said:
Sometimes therapy alone can help a lot with many different things, helping a person understand why they do things or feel the way they do and learn skills or healthier ways to deal with what happens in their life. Sometimes it's hard for some people to even approach working on things that way, and medication of some sort can help them get to the point that they can actually do that work successfully.
I'm generally highly in favor of not using only medication to treat just about anything psychiatric/psychological; there's a bunch of research that shows much better outcomes on average if you combine therapy with it. There are many tools available to doctors to treat things like this, and the trick is being able to figure out both which ones to use in a given situation and also which ones not to use. Unfortunately sometimes they're too overworked seeing too many patients to be able to keep up with the latest research on what works, and you sometimes end up with medications being used when they shouldn't be or not used when they should be and medication/therapy not used together as well as they can be, but mostly they do at least have a genuine desire to try to get it right, despite imperfect knowledge and limited resources and time.
If it turns out that bupropion can help with game addiction, that's useful knowledge to have and another tool available, which is never a bad thing. The tricky part is making sure doctors and patients (some of them can be a pain in the ass about trying to demand treatments that make no sense in their particular situation or wanting a quick fix pill without having to put in any effort themselves) only use it when it makes sense to and continue to remember, use, and take advantage of all the other options available.
(This is kind of one of my "things", and I could go on all day responding to every post in this thread in an attempt to correct dozens of misconceptions (and also point out which ones actually have some truth to them, because some certainly do), but I'd probably just drive everyone nuts. Heh.)