If you have children, you might be a little worried about how much screen time they're having these days. For some, this is just a harmless pastime. But for others, it can turn into an addiction with extreme consequences. Molly Thomas investigates how much is too much. When you are so heavily addicted, when that is your entire life, your brain fears that you will die without it.
Like many kids, Jake Yuskoski loved playing video games. From an early age, he had a controller in his hand. What's special about video games is that they're this mixture of beautiful storytelling or escapism or just a play that you can't find anywhere else. Growing up in their home in Caledon, Ontario, just north of Toronto, his mother Elaine realized he was really good.
I think he started playing the game around three or four, naturally, because his brother was on it. And what we noticed was how dexterous he was. And people would comment, wow, his hand-eye coordination is amazing. And I felt proud. So it was almost like, wow, my kid's doing really good at something.
Yes. But you had no idea that it could be a danger? No, not at all. But in middle school, Jake was bullied. As school friends disappeared, online gamers took their place, consuming all of his time.
How much time did you spend playing? If there wasn't the schoolwork, it was hours on hours on hours, every single day, as much as I could. It was my whole life for a period of time in that middle school space.
Yeah, technology became your best friend. Yeah. Games became my best friend.
I started to lose sleep in order to stay up later and play games longer. The sports and activities that I used to love started to slip away from my priorities. Under his parents'roof, Jake was able to keep up with school.
But university was a different story. In Guelph, away from home in his dorm room, Jake silently fell apart. My experience playing games changed from being this fun, happy place to this challenge and way to try and find some kind of achievement and success until eventually just became the way to get away from all of my pain. In that headspace of gaming consuming so much of my time and being necessary just to stay happy, I no longer had that time to even commit to schoolwork.
He started failing university courses. lost his work placement and was about to get kicked out of residence. My parents didn't know about my situation. They thought I was doing great. I had, over the years, mastered the art of lying to them so that I could keep this space of gaming alive.
In 2014, Jake became desperate and hit rock bottom. I had three choices of either sending an email, which admitted all of my faults, The next option was I could run away or I could kill myself. In a study conducted by the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, 13% of teenagers in Ontario experience some form of gaming problem. Worldwide, addiction estimates vary between 1 to 9%. Some Asian countries have responded to the crisis.
China has put in a curfew on gaming, and South Korea has funded rehab centers. Most forms of gaming actually produce dopamine, and that actually elicits a level of excitement and enjoyment in the game. And that dopamine rush has been looked at as analogous to what happens during substance abuse, when someone is ingesting cocaine, for example.
Jeffrey Daravinsky is a McGill University professor who studies video games. He was part of the groundbreaking team which classified gaming addiction in the disease category at the World Health Organization. That level of excitement and that level of enjoyment that individuals experience when they've reached that new level, that new height, is very difficult to compete with.
And for some gamers, these drug-like hunts are a bit of a challenge. Eyes can bring crashing lows. We know that when people get overly involved in gaming, they go into what psychologists like to call a dissociative state.
They go into what some people call the zone, where they tune out to everything else. Jake got into that danger zone, trapped by the game in his dorm room. On the verge of collapse, he made a desperate plea for help. That was such a painful time in my life.
I wrote the email crying. I sent it and laid down and cried. My mom called me and I was crying. It was Jake's SOS. Elaine frantically drove from her home in Caledon, Ontario, to the University of Guelph to rescue her son, terrified of what she might find.
I knocked at the door and... He opened the door and it was the worst day of my life as a mother. He's six foot two and he weighed 127 pounds. I just hugged bones. He was trembling.
He had facial pain. tics. His face, which was usually squeaky clean, was a mess of acne.
His hair was extremely greasy. He smelled horrific. The room smelled horrific.
And he just looked completely disheveled and so fragile. I just held and held and held him. And realized in that moment that my eyes had been closed long enough, it was time to open them.
Elizabeth Woolley missed those same signs 20 years ago and has been desperately trying to help other families. She only has memories of her son, Sean, who grew up in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. He was an easygoing person. He was gentle and very sensitive. And he was the clown in our family.
He just wanted to make people laugh. Sean was 20 years old when gaming took over. His life changed in the blink of an eye.
How fast did gaming take away the son that you knew? Within three months. I just saw a drastic change in his life.
He started staying up all night, and his dedication to his work went down. He didn't eat. All he did was stay on that computer with that game. Then, the unthinkable happened. So it's Thanksgiving, you go to check on him.
What do you remember? The door was unlocked from the last time I was there, but the chain was there, and I could smell something. And so I broke in, and he was sitting in his bedroom with the rifle by his side, and the game was on the computer.
He was sitting right in front of the computer. I just... I just... Collapsed in the hallway. Nobody in our family had ever committed suicide.
Years have passed since Sean took his life. Now Elizabeth runs Gamers Anonymous to help other addicts, but wishes she could have done more for her own child. Does it get any easier?
It doesn't. Because... I hear the same story over and over and it's just like it makes me so sad. When you look at the loss of your son, when you look at what he went through, who do you blame for this?
After he died, people started contacting me and telling me that the games were now designed to be as addicting as possible. They had a people with degrees in psychology to use mind games and tricks and hooks into the game so that people would stay on the games and so the gaming company's goal was to get the people into the games and keep them there just like a drug pusher who wants to get his own customer addicted so he can make more money and that's exactly what the gaming companies are doing still today the mark of success of uh An online game is how much time people will play and how often they will play it and how many players we can actually have. Derevinsky admits it's a battle against a multi-billion dollar gaming industry.
The industry obviously was very much against it. They didn't want to see anything related to gaming in any psychiatric or in terms of the World Health Organization classifications. They were very concerned that this would actually produce a stigma and frown upon it.
And in a pandemic, when parents and kids are stuck at home, the temptation to overindulge is relentless. In the first month alone, global spending on digital games rose above $12 billion. And overall, video game sales saw a 35% jump from the same time the previous year. We know that in the UK there's been an increase, in Germany there's been an increase of players, and the US has been an increase in players as well during the pandemic. The gaming industry is making record profits.
and continues to make record profits, especially during the pandemic. Coming up... People all over the world are looking for help.
Breaking away from the screen. My life now is something that I literally didn't have any comprehension of. When W5 continues.
Along the beautiful coast of Thailand, a Canadian is reaching out to thousands of followers around the world. When you want to stop gaming, there are four different things you want to do. First, you need to commit to change.
Kamadere is a recovering video game addict himself. He created Game Quitters, an online support group for users to wean themselves off of what can be a dangerous habit. We have about 75,000 people a month who search for help on the website, and that's from 95. Different countries, so people all over the world are looking for help.
And during the pandemic, the number of parents looking for help has skyrocketed. In April, I started to receive a significant increase of inquiries from families all over the world, and I'm continuing to see a significant increase. Before helping the masses, Cam grew up here in Calgary, Alberta.
A budding hockey player spending all of his free time at this rink until gaming took over. He went from playing online for a few hours after school to not being able to stop. You had to lie a lot to your family to keep this habit.
There was a lot of lying and at the time I didn't think there was a problem. And so for me it was just rationalizing my behavior. in order to do what I wanted to do, which was to play video games. And those hours spent online fractured his relationship with his family, a pain he hopes to prevent others from experiencing.
Cam, there are parents across our country looking at their child, wondering if they're just loving the game or if they're addicted. What would you say to them? It's important to distinguish between what's a hobby and what's a passion and what's an addiction. Addiction begins when they have impaired control. over their gaming, when they're losing interest in all other activities in order to game, and when their gaming is escalating, where they're playing more and more and more, and when no amount is enough.
CAM's platform, Game Quitters, is one of the limited resources parents in Canada have to deal with this addiction. The WHO put gaming addiction into its disease category. How big of a deal is that?
It was a significant milestone in this field and it's something that when I started sharing my story over 10 years ago, I never even imagined that sort of thing would take place. But it's important because it provides a lot more validation. While Game Quitters fills an online need, some psychologists say extreme cases need extreme measures, like total in-person rehab.
Canada. doesn't have a single facility like this for gamers, but the U.S. does. Here at this treatment center in Bellevue, Washington, young men and women are encouraged to restart their lives.
It makes me feel alone and isolated. The past few days have been really hard for me. The setting is intentionally simple.
No phones, no computers, no games. Psychologist Hilary Cash co-founded the program. I'd been in private practice for many years specializing in this whole area and frustrated always that there wasn't a specialized treatment facility for those people that I was working with who needed that.
But I didn't feel they were a good fit to go to a drug and alcohol program because personalities tend to be very different, histories are different. Is there a specific profile that you continuously see with gaming addicts? Yeah, I mean they're in bad shape quite often.
They're so depressed that they are having suicidal thoughts. Some of them have made suicide attempts, you know. So often they're pretty desperate. The restart program has three levels.
It starts with a three-month intensive where it's cold turkey on technology. I think it's very important for people to understand that in terms of the changes that the brain is going through, they are the same changes. Whether you're withdrawing from a drug or you're withdrawing from a behavior. The therapy and treatments are intense. People who graduate move on to the transition program where they are gradually reintegrated into society.
I live with people that are all graduates of the program. Charles Brackey graduated from Restart five years ago. For the time being, the closest people in my life are all Restart graduates and other addicts.
Wow. It's changed your life. A hundred percent. My life now is something that I literally didn't have any comprehension of before Restart. At his worst, Charles was gaming 65 hours a week.
He lost his job, had an empty bank account, and was thinking about suicide. That forced him to face his addiction. I went through withdrawal over about my first... 10 to 14 days. I was having trouble sleeping.
I was incredibly irritable. It messed with all my emotions. It threw everything haywire. It's literally the same symptoms that you'd see in a drug or alcohol addict. Oh yeah, absolutely.
I'm five and a half years out of rehab now. No desire to go back to gaming at all. Not that the cravings don't come by from time to time, but my life is so infinitely better now that it's not worth it.
And I never would have been able to get here if I hadn't had the help of someone to guide me. Where do you think you would be? Oh, I'd be dead.
100% I would have gone through with my suicide plan. Professor Jeffrey Derevinsky says Canada needs to catch up to the U.S. I don't think there's enough training. Professionals and mental health professionals in particular who are really familiar enough with gaming and I do think the government's both at the federal level and the provincial level should be designating some funding for more research into this problem.
As the pandemic rages on, Hillary Cash worries the consequences will be dire. We're already hearing reports and the clients who are coming to us right now during the pandemic are people who have just really fallen off the cliff during this time. Young children. are now so much more exposed to a degree that I thought was quite troubling and now that is just skyrocketed and I think we're going to see children in much larger numbers and at much younger ages developing problems with their screen use.
Back in Guelph Ontario, Jake Yudkowsky didn't have around-the-clock help from experts. But he had his mom. It was a long three and a half years, I believe, of just... addiction, addiction, recovery, relapse, recovery, relapse, recovery, relapse. One of the questions that my mom asked me was, Jake, what do we need to do to make this work for you to be able to go to university still?
What I finally came up with as an answer was, I need you to drive me and walk me to the lecture halls. You needed a babysitter, essentially. I needed someone to literally hold my hand through it for that first period of time. His mom Elaine set up a strict check-in schedule to keep him away from his addiction. He was required to take photos of himself up the lecture hall or the classroom and email it to me so I knew he was attending, so he'd have accountability.
And then he had to come home on the weekends to be monitored. I said to him at that point, I am going to save you from yourself. Today, Jake is living on his own in recovery. embracing technology as a software engineer. But when the pandemic hit, he was isolated and knew he needed help.
My brain constantly tapping my shoulders like, hey, you know what would be fun right now? Play a game, play a game, it'll be great. Just relax, play a video game.
You're fine, you've been sober for so long, you can handle it. But I realized that that was horribly dangerous and I had slipped a lot faster than I had in previous times. So you have to be ready for that phone call.
Yeah. Throughout life. At all times.
This is a lifelong process. It is. And so now during the pandemic, he's staying with his mom.
They have a strict routine to keep Jake's mind busy and body healthy. For Jake, that support and friendship has been life-changing. What does it mean to you?
I mean that she never gave up on you. One of the conversations we had, she leaned forward and said, Jake, you have my trust again. It's not gone. I trust you.
I believe you. I believe the words that you say. And... I am so grateful for her and for my family and for my friends who believe in me now, who kept believing in me, who never stopped believing in me. I wouldn't be here without them.
And to know that they trust me is an experience I can't put into words. There is a simple six-question quiz that will help you figure out if gaming has turned into an addiction. We have it up on our website, w5.ctvnews.ca.