Back in July a detox center opened its doors to adults suffering from video game addiction in order help them overcome dependence on gaming, find a healthy balance, and reconnect with the world. The reSTART: Internet Addiction Recovery Program is the first of its kind in the United States. Co-founders Cosette Dawna Rae, MSW, and Hilarie Cash, PhD, had worked with adults in the past who exhibited signs of gaming addiction that were unresponsive to outpatient treatment. With no other resources available they decided to create a 45-day residential stay program tailored toward technology addiction that could offer the services they need.

The reSTART program has received nearly 100 applicants from all over the world – mostly male – since the program’s inception, with the majority of gaming addictions cited as related to World of Warcraft and first-person shooters on Xbox Live. Services are offered just 13 miles from Microsoft’s headquarters in Washington. Patients under the age of 18 are seen on an outpatient basis, while adults 18 and older can participate in the residential program. Now that reSTART has been open for several months, we reached out to Rae to discuss the current state of the program, video game addiction, the process of gaming rehab, and more.

How would you classify gaming addiction? (How is it assessed, signs, symptoms, etc.?)

What we look for is someone who has a strong desire, impulse to game or use the internet. Somebody who, when they try to cut down their use, were unable to do that. If it is starting to have a negative impact on their life, social life, relationships or academics, maybe they’re spending too much time gaming or online. We’ve heard of people in their seventh year of college because gaming got in the way, and they were only able to do one class a quarter instead of maintaining a regular class schedule. We may find people that are working and miss work because they were gaming the night before and were too tired to get up, or it impacts their job in some way. We’re looking for a pattern of use that’s starting to impact all the other things occurring in their life.

In cases of video game addiction that you’ve treated in the past, are there any in particular that resonate with you?

What’s really interesting is the stories are very similar in nature; sometimes it’s just the games that are different, but the stories that you hear are quite the same. “I started playing when I was younger, I really enjoyed it, and I started spending more and more time. I thought I could manage the amount of use I had.” A lot of times they end up going off to college where they don’t have parental influence and end up spending more time gaming than actually doing their studies. The GPA had been affected by increased gaming use and eventually what happens is that parents decide they need to pull them out of school because it’s just too expensive to keep them there when they’re not performing well. What happens is they often come home and spend time gaming at home because they often reflect that they’re bored and have nothing to do, and that kind of becomes their world. That’s the pattern I hear over and over. There also tends to be a large correlation between people struggling with depression, people with A.D.H.D. or A.D.D., and people that have some social anxiety and gaming addiction. They’ll have A.D.D. and find they’ll really get into a game and can’t control their use.

There was a case, and one of the reasons I got into this, a young man had been diagnosed with depression and anxiety, and the way he felt better about those things was to spend his time in World of Warcraft. He dropped out of high school for three years and didn’t do anything but game. He eventually switched from WoW to Halo. It got worse and worse, and a lot of the therapists working with him didn’t know how to assess for it, didn’t know what questions to ask, didn’t know how to treat it, and so he eventually necessitated going into a different residential stay program.