According to the World Health Organization (WHO), excessive gaming may now be a mental disorder. In the new draft of the WHO’s 11th International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11), which will be released next year, gaming disorder will now be listed. The symptoms include “impaired control over gaming,” as well as playing video games over “other life interests and daily activities,” resulting in “the occurrence of negative consequences.” Here’s the WHO draft:
The behavior pattern is of sufficient severity to result in significant impairment in personal, family, social, educational, occupational, or other important areas of functioning. The gaming behavior and other features are normally evident over a period of at least 12 months in order for a diagnosis to be assigned, although the required duration may be shortened if all diagnostic requirements are met and symptoms are severe.
So the very condition of gaming excessively is now a disorder, according to the WHO. But don’t worry — if you’re a transgender gamer, you only have one mental disorder: gaming. By 2018, the WHO is expected to declassify transgenderism as a mental disorder, as The Washington Post reported last year:
The proposals to declassify transgender identity as a mental disorder have been approved by each committee that has considered it so far. … Transgender activist groups have been working toward this for years, said Mauro Cabral, one of the program directors of the Global Action for Trans Equality.
Yes, you’re reading this correctly: gaming to the extent that you prioritize playing video games over “other life interests and daily activities” will be internationally recognized as a diagnosable mental illness, but believing that you are a member of the opposite sex isn’t a mental disorder at all — the only reason you’d be impaired by that condition is if society is mean to you, despite a lifetime suicide attempt rate of four in ten among transgender people.
And then the scientific community wonders why laypeople don’t take their completely anti-scientific redefinition of mental illness seriously?