Computer, Video Games and Psychosis: Cause for Concern

In this February 2011 post, Victoria Dunckley describes five patients aged 15 to 22 in her own caseload, all with psychotic-type symptoms such as hallucinations or paranoia, who she says all used screens six or more hours daily. She associates this with sleep loss, overstimulation, and elevated activity in dopamine-related reward circuits, and reports that symptoms eased in most of these patients after they stopped or sharply reduced screen use, without added psychiatric medication in most cases; the one patient who did not reduce use continued to have symptoms. She proposes a multi-week screen removal period as a diagnostic step clinicians could consider for young patients with new, unexplained psychotic symptoms. TechKids Foundation includes this small case series as a documented clinical claim from Dunckley's practice, distinct from her broader mood-and-attention framework and not published in a peer-reviewed journal or replicated in controlled research.

REPORT A PROBLEM WITH THIS ENTRY