'Tens of thousands of Londoners hooked on web porn and games'

Tens of thousands of Londoners are addicted to the internet after becoming obsessed with gaming, pornography and social media, a leading psychiatrist warned today.

An increasing number are believed to be compulsive web users, with parents of children as young as 14 seeking help from National Problem Gambling Clinic, run by Central and North West London NHS Foundation Trust.

Experts now want to create the UK’s first centre for internet disorders in Fulham after a successful pilot project.

One hundred internet addicts were treated, some of whom racked up 50 hours of “pathological” internet use each week — “hardly speaking” to their family, watching porn at work, or playing online games for 14 hours straight.

The clinic’s director, consultant psychiatrist Henrietta Bowden-Jones, said she had seen an increasing number of requests from Londoners for help.

There is currently no NHS money to fund a full-time internet addiction service in the UK due to government mental health cuts. Dr Bowden-Jones said: “By the time the addiction has taken over, people can forget to eat.

“If you find yourself spending three or four hours a day on the internet to the detriment of other social or physical activities, avoiding family dinners or going out with your partner to enjoy a film or meal out, when you stop reading books or magazines because all you are thinking about is this preoccupation with the internet, it is time to start changing behaviours.

“It’s a compulsion that doesn’t allow you to take stock of the fact it’s now 5am, or your wife is shouting at you, or you haven’t fed your kids because you are online.

"We see people who prefer their virtual life to daily reality, who can arrive extremely obese and haven’t moved for weeks, or I have seen people who are extremely thin and malnourished.

"People have lost their job or dropped out of university.”

The current largest British study of its kind, conducted by Nottingham Trent University academics in 2013, found 3.2 per cent of student respondents to a screening test were classified as “addicted to the internet”.

A separate EU-funded study of 11,356 adolescents from Austria, Estonia, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Romania, Slovenia and Spain, co-ordinated in Sweden, found 4.2 per cent were pathological internet users.

Fears that “tens of thousands” of Londoners are addicted are a projection based on these two studies.

Dr Bowden-Jones hopes the gaming industry will help fund the new centre, which will include greater research into the problem. “Even if the gaming industry donated 0.05 per cent of their profits towards treatment, we could create a clinic for the best evidence-based centre for treatment, prevention, education and research.”

For treatment, psychologists use cognitive behavioural therapy, which has shown to be effective for internet disorders.

‘Teenager stays up all night... it is a mental health issue’

A London teenager who spends all night online gaming is among those receiving help for addiction.

His problems began at 13 when he was given a PC for Christmas. The boy played more and more of the block-building game Minecraft, his family said.

Now aged 15, he has managed to get around their efforts to restrict his internet use.

When his mother turned off the landline connection at bedtime, he got online by buying pay-as-you-go data on his iPhone and tethering it to his computer.

His aunt said: “It crept into being later and later until it’s got to the point where he stays up all night and doesn’t go to school either because he’s asleep or still online.

“My sense is having spent so much time in his room on his computer not really dealing with real people is contributing to a degree of social anxiety. I see it very much as a mental health issue.”

He was 14 when the family contacted consultant psychiatrist Henrietta Bowden-Jones for help.

His aunt urged web providers to do more to help families with relatives whose web use is excessive.

“When I contacted Henrietta she said I was the fifth person that week.

This is not just a problem for our family, it’s happening up and down the country and I can’t understand why internet service providers, who are making huge amounts of money, aren’t contributing a little bit more in terms of understanding and managing some of the problems with compulsive internet behaviours.”

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