A private treatment centre for young computer-game addicts has opened in Amsterdam, a last refuge for desperate parents who are willing to pay big money to wean their children off their virtual addiction.
”I was bullied at school and did not have a lot of friends, so I went home and played computer games,” Tim told Agence France-Presse.
Twelve years after he got his first computer, 21-year-old Tim said he used to spend some 20 hours a day playing games. He was into violent war games, sometimes neo-Nazi games.
”Shooting at people, aiming for their heads, crashing a tank into their house … that was my reality. Even now, when I see a joystick my fingers itch,” he said on Friday after a month-long treatment at the Smith and Jones clinic.
To keep going Tim, who hails from the Dutch central city of Utrecht, turned to drugs: ”Cocaine, ecstasy, hashish; I did every kind of drug.”
”Every day was the same ritual: In the morning I would get up and go out to get drugs. I would get back around 11am and get behind the computer until 4 in the morning,” he said.
”My room was a mess: curtains drawn, pizza boxes, empty bottles and junk food wrappers everywhere … I didn’t even get up to use the bathroom but peed in a bottle while I kept playing.”
Tim’s increasingly violent outbursts scared his parents. At 139kg he was too big and strong for them to confront.
”I got my vocational education business degree but I never went to classes. My parents did my homework,” Tim said.
Finally, a month ago his parents said ”enough”.
”They told me: ‘It’s either the clinic or we kick you out’.”
He chose the clinic and became the fist computer-game addict in the care of Smith and Jones.
”During the intake discussion, I told him you stay here tonight and he asked: ‘Can I keep my Game Boy?,” Keith Bakker, the American who founded the Amsterdam clinic, remembered.
His clinic also treats alcoholics, drug addicts and bulimics. Most of Bakker’s ‘clients’ hail from abroad. The treatment does not come cheap but the management is evasive about Smith and Jones’s rates. It depends on the clients’ income, they said.
On the menu for recovering addicts is a half-hour mediation session in the morning, fitness training and, most importantly, long group-therapy sessions and obligatory meetings in the evening.
Every day the clients have to discuss their addiction problems with a personal coach or a psychologist.
”Suddenly, around 18 months ago, we started seeing a lot of games addicts. It was completely new for me,” Bakker told AFP.
”The youngest we had was six years old.”
These people ”have no power or control over themselves and their lives”, explained Steven Noel-Hill, a former gambling addict who is coaching Tim.
”These are kids who are not happy at school, with themselves, with their lives. The area they can control is this world on a screen; they can now be God,” he said.
One of the big difficulties for game addicts is that even after therapy they will have to use a computer for the rest of their lives because of society’s dependence on computer technology, Noel-Hill added.
After the school summer holiday, the clinic will open special after-school courses for Amsterdam’s game-addicted students.
In July they will treat a group of 15 addicted youngsters, mostly from the United States.
”We will have a camp, building stuff in the woods and nature. The idea is to develop team spirit so that they don’t have to go into a fantasy world,” Noel-Hill said.
”It is going to be hard,” the coach thinks.
”They don’t want to be here and they have much anger inside them.” — AFP
