The head of Europe’s first treatment centre for gaming addicts has revealed that 90% of young people who seek counseling for compulsive gaming habits aren’t actually addicts at all.

Keith Bakker of The Smith & Jones Centre in Amsterdam explains that while a gamers who show other addictive behaviours such as drinking or taking drugs have been successfully treated using traditional abstinence-based treatment models, the vast majority of compulsive gamers have a social problem, rather than a psychological one. “This gaming problem is a result of the society we live in today,” Mr Bakker told BBC News. “Eighty per cent of the young people we see have been bullied at school and feel isolated. Many of the symptoms they have can be solved by going back to good old fashioned communication.”