Drugs to treat some psychiatric disorders can be quite effective, but usually come with potential side effects. If there were other ways to treat these conditions that didn’t involve pharmaceuticals — such as video games — it could change the mental health field significantly.
As NPR reported:
The market for these “brain fitness” games is worth about $1 billion and is expected to grow to $6 billion in the next five years. Game makers appeal to both the young and the older with the common claim that if you exercise your memory, you’ll be able to think faster and be less forgetful.
But the idea of games being used to things like treat post-traumatic stress disorder, traumatic brain injury, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, autism and Alzheimer’s disease, doesn’t come without its critics.
Psychology professor Randall Engle from the Georgia Institute of Technology told NPR that assuming games would make any real differences is “absurd.”
“We’re really talking about a biological system,” Engle said. “The idea that you can do some little computer game for half an hour a day for ten days and change that system is ludicrous on the face of it.”
A letter was signed by 75 scientists, including Engle, criticizing the commercialization of these “brain games” for profit. But others believe there is reason to think there could be some promise in using games as treatment.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Neuroscientist Adam Gazzaley from the University of California, San Francisco, is working on a fully immersive video game (among a few others) focused on multitasking in order to increase cognitive control, which includes working memory, attention and goal management.
One of the issues is that video games don’t go through the same vigorous clinical trials like drugs do, but Gazzaley told NPR that there are certain unique qualities of games and real-time data gathering that could actually improve understanding about whether or not treatment is working.
“Instead of having a patient come in, receiving a therapeutic, like a pill, going home, and having them subjectively monitor the impact and come back months later and report that,” he said, “here we have the ability to track in real time what the impact of this therapeutic is.”
Once games potentially get approved by the FDA to be prescribed by doctors, even if they aren’t sufficient treatments on their own, they could at least be possible supplemental ways to treat some of the disorders.
Photo: Flickr user Pollard
