La Voz de Galicia – September 17, 2021 →
I read this week a news item about the publication of the first clinical case in the world about a minor hospitalized because of his addiction to a videogame. And the more I informed myself about the case, the more I thought about how complex it is to be an adolescent, about how complex it is to learn to be.
The team, comprised of professionals of the Provincial Hospital at Castelló, the Universitat Jaume I, and the General Hospital Universitari at Castelló spoke, among other things «about how the use of the videogame began as a refuge for his emotional malaise.» And then I was thinking about the meaning of «emotional malaise,» and I asked myself whether all those other addictions that accompanied the preceding generations could be related to that idea.
Suddenly, I remembered my deceased father’s advice for walking around safely in our neighborhood at the beginning of the 1990s since syringes appeared everywhere on our street (and in our doorway). And I also remembered the sleepless nights we spent at home waiting for the police to arrive and stop a fight among drunk teenagers in the old town center. And it’s that there have always been addictions, and what can bring us to them is as simple and complex as life itself. And even though we know that many of these items are designed precisely to create addicts, we continue to have no way of fighting against that «emotional malaise» that leads many minors to become addicts even before their adolescence.
Learning to be is difficult, especially when we feel emotions that we have not felt before. But as a society, we will have to find a way to help each other at some moment because even though we may not realize it, the web and the TV have turned us all into addicts…
