By Iffath Fathima Open and SHUT case at Nimhans: Kids are getting hooked to games, but it’s the mums and dads who are stressed out and landing up at the hospital Players Unknown’s Battleground (PUBG – pronounced pubji), an online multiplayer shooting game may have fans that run into 400 million and counting all over the world, but there are enough and more in Bengaluru too. The downside of this is that there are as many online gaming addicts of this game that psychologists at National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences (NIMHANS) are dealing with. However, a unique fallout of this is not the addicts themselves who are being treated, but their parents. In the last three months, there have been about 90 cases of parents of users coming to the Services for Healthy Use of Technology (SHUT) clinic at NIMHANS to deal with caregiver burden. Dr Manoj Sharma, Professor of Clinical Psychology at SHUT is well acquainted with such cases.

“The rise in popularity of PUBG has led to many children showing signs of online gaming addiction. From the past three months, we have been getting at least seven to eight cases per week. We started to notice that there has been an increase in cases where parents are coming to us with a condition called “caregiver burden”.

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Parents are feeling the burden of dealing with their children’s addiction. Managing a child with a gaming addiction is taking its toll on them. Earlier, cases of parents being affected by their children’s addiction were few and far between but this has increased drastically. The gaming addiction is hard to kick. Glenn gould a state of wonder rar. Now we have to treat two people, the patient and the parent,” said Sharma. Impact on parents An 18-year-old boy was brought to the clinic with a history of playing for 10 to 14 hours a day. This led to decreased attention on academics, decreased interaction with parents, irregular food habits and sleeping patterns, and a huge resistance to seeking help.

“The parents put in effort to seek help, paid for counselling but the boy did not want to seek help. This led to frequent fights between the parents. The mother, a working woman, decide to go on leave without pay, in the hope that staying with her son at home would make him quit playing the game.

But the mother showed signs of depression and anxiety disorder, poor eating habits and weight loss. The father of the boy was focussed only on his son’s gaming addiction and the relationship between the couple suffered,” says Dr Sharma. Career around addiction The addiction takes strange forms, says Dr Sharma. If it’s not spending waking hours playing the game, it is planning one’s career around it. A 17-year-old who indulged in playing the game for 12 hours a day, told his parents that he wanted to develop his hobby into a career. When his parents advised him against it, he acted out and was very negative.

He dropped out of college too. “His father was ok with his decision to develop it into a career but his mother wanted the boy to finish his education. The constant fights and disagreements led to the mother’s mental health being affected. The mother started feeling low and seemed disinterested in everything. The father also showed signs of mild stress,” says Sharma. The couple came to him for help along with their son.