Gaming addiction: how the NHS is tackling the problem

In October 2019 the NHS announced the opening of its first gaming addiction clinic, the National Centre for Gaming Disorders,1 with a fanfare of publicity. “This new service is a response to an emerging problem, part of the increasing pressures that children and young people are exposed to these days,” said Simon Stevens, then chief executive of NHS England.2

The unveiling came a year after the World Health Organization had recognised gaming disorder as a medical condition for the first time, including it in its 11th revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11).3 The clinic is based in the National Centre for Behavioural Addictions in London, and as it approaches its fifth anniversary its staff and founder have opened its doors to The BMJ to explain what goes on behind the scenes.

“I had an urgency in relation to setting this up,” says Henrietta Bowden-Jones, the clinic’s founder. She says that with the benefit of hindsight, she’s now “horrified” that nothing was previously available to patients. The centre’s creation in 2019 was part of a broader move by NHS England to establish specialist clinics designed to tackle behavioural addictions—primary among them, gambling.

The issue of gaming was an adjunct to that, says Bowden-Jones. “The gaming clinic was agreed mainly because there was talk of the confluence between gambling and gaming—the possibility that young gamers would become gamblers. The transition between the two would then be able to be explored,” she says. At that time there was a significant regulatory focus on children’s addiction to “loot boxes,”4 where gamers could buy …