The dangers of Pokemon Go

Two days later I was sent yet another link. This latest article from a major national newspaper waxed poetic about kids and the new Pokémon craze. According to that article, Pokémon Go is a parent’s dream, a video game holy grail: a game that actually got kids up off the couch and outside exploring and interacting with the real world — albeit while staring at a screen and pursuing an illusory augmented reality hologram.

That small detail aside, I had to ask myself: well, is this the game that finally proves the screen alarmists wrong? After all, kids are going outside to play the game and collaborating with others to find clues in their digital scavenger hunts. Aren’t those good things? In that same pro Pokémon Go article, a child and adolescent psychologist interviewed for the piece, was quoted saying “it gets kids out in the world and promotes socialization. It seems that kids are using it as a tool to connect to each other and the world around them.”

All that sounds perfectly reasonable, but my research and clinical work indicates otherwise. If you’re a child or pre-teen, there may be a price to pay. To be clear: If you’re an adult, have at it! Pokémon Go to your heart’s content; wander the streets looking for the little augmented reality buggers. Just be careful you don’t walk into oncoming traffic or light posts, but Pokémon your days away if you like.

But children have additional vulnerabilities when they interact with interactive and immersive screens; their brains and what psychologists call “reality testing” — the ability to discern what’s real and what isn’t — are not fully developed yet. That’s why researchers who study the effects of immersive and interactive video game experiences have coined the term “Game Transfer Phenomenon” (GTP) — a reality-blurring psychotic-like feature that young people who are chronic gamers experience.

Researchers Drs. Mark Griffiths and Angelica Ortiz de Gortari conducted three studies with over 1,600 video gamers in Great Britain. They found that many showed GTP effects: gamers hearing or seeing aspects of the game hours or days after they had stopped playing. Some reported hearing sound effects, music and characters voices; others heard explosions, sword swipes and screams. One gamer reported hearing someone from the game constantly whispering “death” for a few days after he had stopped playing while others reported seeing images from the game pop up in front of their eyes.

Indeed, many young children who are Minecraft devotees report seeing the real world in the cube shapes of the game or see the cubes in their dreams. In my own private clinical practice, I’ve had the incredible experience of working with young gamers who had blurred reality with that of their game; one teen had to be psychiatrically hospitalized for a month after he had fallen down the rabbit hole — or into the matrix, pick your metaphor — of World of Warcraft and suffered a version of what I term “Video Game Psychosis.”

To be sure, there are children and teens with underlying emotional or psychological issues that may make them more vulnerable to such unfortunate outcomes when they are exposed to reality-blurring game experiences. But that’s the point — we don’t always know who those particularly vulnerable children are when we expose them to “the Matrix” (the mind-bending illusory world in the Keanu Reeves trippy film).

Beyond the work of Drs. Griffiths and de Gortari, researchers at Tel Aviv University published documented cases of “Internet-related psychosis” indicating that immersive screens were generating “true psychotic phenomena” and that this spiraling psychopathology was “a new consequence of our times.” Dr. Joel Gold at NYU and his brother Ian at McGill University are investigating whether the reality-severing aspects of technology can lead to hallucinations, delusions and genuine psychosis.

Finally, my friend and colleague Commander Dr. Andrew Doan, a Johns Hopkins-educated M.D. and Ph.D. in neuroscience who is the Head of Addiction and Mental Health Research for the U.S. Navy/Pentagon, has researched video game effects and has documented case studies of young video-gaming soldiers who, when combined with sleep deprivation, had psychotic-like delusions and, in one instance, homicidal ideations. Yet when the homicidal gamer unplugged and got some sleep, the ideations went away.