There’s a problem when you’re a big digital publisher and pretty much allow anyone to write under your masthead. If you don’t carefully review and vet contributions from outside authors, people are going to write ridiculous things and make outrageous claims. Which, if allowed, will come back to haunt your reputation as a source of real, factual news.
Take, for instance, Forbes‘ recent article about “Gaming Disorder,” which makes the shocking claim that the World Health Organization has just endorsed this new mental health diagnosis.
The only problem with this claim? It’s a lie, in my opinion.
I’m sure Bruce Y. Lee means well in his article discussing “gaming disorder,” noting that it recently appeared in a draft version of the next edition of the ICD-11. (The ICD-11 is the diagnostic manual the world uses to classify all medical diseases and mental disorders; the United States, however, relies more on the DSM-5 for mental disorder diagnoses.)
Here’s what Lee claims:
Being in the ICD-11 means that it is officially a health condition, a diagnosis that can be used by doctors, other health care workers, and insurance companies. Some may even call it a label.
Now Lee, an Associate Professor of International Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, should know better than to make this claim. He should know what a draft version of a document means.
In fact, the ICD-11 Draft makes is super easy to understand what things in it mean at this early stage of its development. They put a disclaimer on every single page:
- NOT FINAL
- updated on a daily basis
- It is not approved by WHO
- NOT TO BE USED for CODING except for agreed FIELD TRIALS
The ICD-11 Draft is published so that researchers can better coordinate additional literature reviews and meta-analyses on the proposed diagnoses. A draft version of the ICD typically takes years to make its way from draft form to its final form. It is not published so that random bloggers can write apparently false articles hyping possible new diagnoses.
Most importantly, it basically undermines everything Lee claims. These are very important things Lee never mentions in his Forbes article. One, that this diagnostic proposal is not final. Two, no doctors, insurance companies, or clinicians can use this diagnosis on people they see in practice. And three, it is, in fact, not a World Health Organization approved diagnosis.
Yet that’s the exact opposite of what Lee says in his opening paragraph:
Who believes that playing video games can become a mental health disorder? Yes, the World Health Organization, that’s WHO.
It’s no wonder mainstream media outlets like Forbes are suffering from reputation problems. When they allow publication of hyperbolic articles like this proclaiming the World Health Organization has just recognized a new mental disorder when it actually hasn’t, that’s a real problem.
That’s why you probably shouldn’t get your health or psychology news from a publication like Forbes (or take what you read there with a healthy grain of salt). There just seems to be little editorial oversight at these large digital publishers when it comes to the validity of the health information they publish. And such oversight would seem to be kind of important for a news publication that wants to continue to be taken seriously.
So yes, while “gaming disorder” is being considered in the ICD-11 Draft version of the diagnostic manual, it is not a recognized mental disorder at this time. Not by the World Health Organization or any other organization.
Read the Forbes article now: Do You Have Video “Gaming Disorder”, A Newly Recognized Mental Health Condition?
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