Including gaming disorder in the ICD-11: the need to do so from a clinical and public health perspective

Rumpf, H.-J. and Achab, S. and Billieux, J. and Bowden-Jones, H. and Carragher, N. and Demetrovics, Z. and Higuchi, S. and King, D.L. and Mann, K. and Potenza, M. and Saunders, J.B. and Abbott, M. and Ambekar, A. and Aricak, O.T. and Assanangkornchai, S. and Bahar, N. and Borges, G. and Brand, M. and Chan, E.M.-L. and Chung, T. and Derevensky, J. and El Kashef, A. and Farrell, M. and Fineberg, N.A. and Gandin, C. and Gentile, D.A. and Griffiths, M.D. and Goudriaan, A.E. and Grall-Bronnec, M. and Hao, W. and Hodgins, D.C. and Ip, P. and Király, O. and Lee, H.K. and Kuss, D. and Lemmens, J.S. and Long, J. and Lopez-Fernandez, O. and Mihara, S. and Petry, N.M. and Pontes, Halley and Rahimi-Movaghar, A. and Rehbein, F. and Rehm, J. and Scafato, E. and Sharma, M. and Spritzer, D. and Stein, D.J. and Tam, P. and Weinstein, A. and Wittchen, H.-U. and Wölfling, K. and Zullino, D. and Poznyak, V. (2018) Including gaming disorder in the ICD-11: the need to do so from a clinical and public health perspective. Journal of Behavioral Addictions 7 (3), pp. 556-561. ISSN 2063-5303.

Abstract

The proposed introduction of gaming disorder (GD) in the 11th revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) developed by the World Health Organization (WHO) has led to a lively debate over the past year. Besides the broad support for the decision in the academic press, a recent publication by van Rooij et al. (2018) repeated the criticism raised against the inclusion of GD in ICD-11 by Aarseth et al. (2017). We argue that this group of researchers fails to recognize the clinical and public health considerations, which support the WHO perspective. It is important to recognize a range of biases that may influence this debate; in particular, the gaming industry may wish to diminish its responsibility by claiming that GD is not a public health problem, a position which maybe supported by arguments from scholars based in media psychology, computer games research, communication science, and related disciplines. However, just as with any other disease or disorder in the ICD-11, the decision whether or not to include GD is based on clinical evidence and public health needs. Therefore, we reiterate our conclusion that including GD reflects the essence of the ICD and will facilitate treatment and prevention for those who need it.

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