Totally wired

Locked in their bedrooms, playing into the small hours, children as young as 10 years old are now obsessed with their consoles. Why are so many young people addicted to video games?

- Tim Lewis

I WAS ONLY WHEN THE DOORBELL RANG AT 2AM that Dee realised how serious a problem her son had. She had been asleep, so she was especially disoriented to open the door and find two paramedics, an ambulance blinking behind them in the dark. The lead medic asked if Jake was home. She directed him to the bedroom of her son, who was 16 at the time. Five years

later, the shock and distress still causes Dee’s eyes to fill with tears. “I didn’t know what was happening,” she recalls. “It’s the worst nightmare a mother could ever think of.”

Owing to patient confidentiality, it was not immediately clear who had called the paramedics or why. Dee, who lives in the West Midlands, had to piece it together over the subsequent days. But eventually she worked out that the chain of events had started the night before when she had come home late from her job as an NHS nurse practitioner. Her shift finished at 10pm and she had asked Jake to make her some rice to eat when she got back. He hadn’t done it: as usual, he was holed up in his room playing video games. Dee lost her temper and confiscated his laptop. The following day, Jake stayed in his room and sent increasingly fraught and extreme messages to his girlfriend. On the instant-messaging platform Discord, he complained about his mother to his gaming-community friends. At some point, he went to the kitchen and took a knife back to his room. His thought processes spiralled darkly, to the extent that his girlfriend feared he was suicidal and called the ambulance.

“Jake did not tell his girlfriend why he wanted to kill himself,” says Dee, who later accessed her son’s phone and laptop. “But his messages are just heartbreaking to read: he’s saying he feels useless, he is nothing … It did not sound like my son. How on earth does he feel this? He is a really loved child, a favourite grandson, the only grandson. He’s my everything.”