And I don't want to go into a lot of information about it because we're really not doing a webinar on marijuana right now. But marijuana is really the number one problem right now. And as far as if we have kids that have a concurrent mental health disorder, it's definitely conduct disorder. That's our second and then the one right behind that is generally attention deficit hyperactivity disorder with or without hyperactivity and the second drug of choice is alcohol because alcohol is still enormously prevalent and it's really easy to get, so that's what kinda cracks me up too is when they talk about legalizing marijuana is that we're taking steps to make sure that kids can't get their hands on it because you have to be 21 in order to, well, that's bunk. All you have to do is look at our current legal drugs, which are alcohol and tobacco and most of our kids smoke too, that's not their presenting problem. Generally, you're not gonna get into as much trouble with tobacco products as you are with other drugs or alcohol and so I didn't list that although that really should have gone on the list.
- [Voiceover] Tobacco. - [Voiceover] Tobacco, yeah, so anyway It's just really interesting the difference in opinion and attitude and approach around the whole marijuana issue, so anyway, lest we digress, let's chat a little bit about gamers and the internet. - [Voiceover] Thank you, that was so useful. I think we could spend and hour talking about what you keep noticing walking in the door. I appreciate that, Denise. Funny little poster on the left that I found on the internet that I'm a gamer, not because I don't have a life, but because I choose to have many, that just scares me. Because I know people who are on the verge of mental illness or who are already mentally ill or who are, and by mental illness I mean anything from depression all the way up to schizophrenia, If that's their habit of choice and are more and more isolated, I am really scared about what's going on in their basements. On the other hand, I see absolutely nothing wrong with the picture on the right given appropriate boundaries. If we could get parents to do that, to spend a Sunday morning in their jammies playing a video game with their son, that would be awesome! They would probably have improved relations and all kinds of better family style. But what do you hear about instead? - [Voiceover] It's interesting, this is Denise E. It's interesting because the gamers that we have at Quest that really do spend a lot of time playing video games, really it's much more of an isolative activity, it's not usually an activity that the whole family is engaging in, especially when they spend hours and hours doing it and the research says that people that spend so many hours gaming have increased desensitization and so their tolerance increases, just like it does with drugs and alcohol. One of the scariest things that I've ever read about gaming is the couple in Korea who allowed their infant, their live infant to die from neglect, because they were too busy caring for an avatar infant in a video game. - [Voiceover] True story. - [Voiceover] It's really scary to me about how the internet world takes over people's brains. There's a journal called Nature and they did a study and they actually found that excessive gaming releases dopamine similar to what's observed after IV injection of stimulant drugs like amphetamines. So it's another area where we need to be really very careful about how much time we allow our children to spend playing video games. When we work with families at Quest, we work with parents about setting up consequences for negative behavior, boundaries around activities, we encourage people to only have their computers in an open area of the house.
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AuthorGeorge Evans is a teacher at High school, Literature tutor, translator and just a good father of 2 girls. George uses for his writings Robot Don essay checker. In his free time, George likes to visit new places, read interesting literature and play with his children. Archives
April 2019
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