HuffPost – 01 September 2015 – Inside Britain’s First Technology Addiction Clinic: When Playing Candy Crush Is No Longer A Game
Standing in the reception of Nightingale Hospital, there is one thing that sets it apart from any NHS waiting room I have ever been in: the sense of stillness.
There are no screens buzzing to tell patients when it’s time for their appointment and there is no one tapping away on their phone while they wait to be seen by a doctor.
Nightingale exudes a feeling of calm, which I suppose shouldn’t be all that surprising, considering the fact that it hosts the UK’s first technology addiction clinic.
Dr Richard Graham approached Nightingale’s director Martin Thomas about setting up the clinic in 2009. At the time, Dr Graham was working at an NHS practice and had identified technology addiction as a growing problem.
“Particularly with young men I was seeing for depression, I started to see that their use of video games such as World of Warcraft was a very prominent part of what was concerning parents, friends and teachers,” he tells me, as we sit in one of hospital’s vast conference rooms….
Full article available here
