Treating Technology Addiction with Nature

Given that people have been talking lately about the environmental potentials of video games I thought this article about the uses of environment to assist with VG addiction treatment might be of interest. Click the title below to link to the full story.

Reposted from NPR.org

“When Playing Video Games Means Sitting on Life’s Sidelines”

A facility outside Seattle, surrounded by pine trees, is a refuge for addicts — of technology.

There are chickens, a garden and a big tree house with a zipline. A few guys kick a soccer ball around between therapy appointments in the cottage’s grassy backyard.

The reSTART center was set up in 2009. It treats all sorts of technology addictions, but most of the young men who come through here — and they are all young men — have the biggest problem with video games.

There are beds for seven patients at a time. After they spend six intensive weeks of rehab here, they go to a transitional situation — an apartment close by, where they live with other former reSTART patients.

That step used to be called Level 2, but program manager Rachell Montag says that was too similar to video game language, so they changed it.

“In gaming, the goal is always to be moving forward and leveling up, and so we didn’t want our language to parallel that, because it can actually have an effect on their behavior and their recovery process in that phase,” she tells NPR’s Rachel Martin.