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Wired: Why are so many young people addicted to video games?

Locked in their bedrooms, playing video games into the small hours, children as young as 10 years old are now addicted to their consoles. Tim Lewis hears how the compulsive games can be impossible to resist – and meets the experts tackling the issue

Dee had read a newspaper article about a new NHS National Centre for Gaming Disorders that was being set up; she made contact, but the service wasn’t taking on patients yet. The story of Dee – and Jake, who agreed to be featured in this article, but preferred not to be interviewed – is depressingly familiar to Professor Henrietta Bowden-Jones OBE, the founder and director of the National Centre for Gaming Disorders. Bowden-Jones has been pushing for urgent extra funding and the clinic has taken the difficult decision to pause family work: this has brought the assessment waiting time down from over a year to three months.

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