Therapy Also Effective in Involving a Father in Child’s Problem
A treatment that involves the innovative use of sexual stimulation and doughnuts has won the National Association of Video Game Addiction Therapists prestigious Treatment of the Year award.
“Finally, vindication,” shouted a jubilant Robert Westheimer, a video game addiction therapist from Littleton, Colorado, when his award was announced at AVGAT’s annual meeting in Boston.
Westheimer’s therapeutic approach to the growing scourge of video game addiction has been attacked by critics for creating two new addictions among adolescent males in order to control the video game problem.
“This is a dark day for our profession when we endorse treating addiction to video games by turning a helpless patient into a masturbation and overeating addict,” grumbled Wanda Plimpton, a video game addiction therapist from South Bend, Indiana.
Plimpton, who derisively nicknamed Westheimer’s therapy “Jerk It and Stuff It,” said she had been approached by other AVGAT members about starting a petition campaign to have Westheimer’s award withdrawn.
The Westheimer therapy involves sending a scantily-dressed young woman carrying a box of two dozen jelly doughnuts into the room where an adolescent male video game addict is sitting at the computer gaming away, oblivious to the outside world.
Westheimer will not discuss the therapeutic details of what the young woman does to distract the male gamer. He says only that she “touches him in certain places in as chaste a manner as possible while at the same time offering jelly doughnuts one after another.”
“This treatment modality has a ninety-five percent success rate,” Westheimer said. “Some cases take as many as two dozen sessions, some as few as half a dozen sessions.”
Westheimer said that the treatment failures are often linked to food allergies involving the doughnut dough or the jelly filling.
“We’ve begun experimenting with a alternative foods to doughnuts, like potato chips or chocolate chip cookies, for example,” he said.
In the formal presentation of his treatment and its results at the AVGAT meeting in Boston, Westheimer said he was surprised to see the keen interest that the fathers of many of his patients showed in helping their sons beat the video game addiction demon.
“In most families, the father is aloof and ridicules his son and shouts at him about being a man and getting a job,” Westheimer said. “But it is not unusual that once the father of an addict understands how our treatment works, he volunteers to go into his son’s room and participate in the therapy.”
Westheimer said it was “truly heartwarming” to see the new bonds that formed between a father and son as the addiction treatments unfolded.