Games

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Dee had read a newspaper article about a new NHS National Centre for Gaming Disorders that was being set up; she made contact, but the service wasn’t taking on patients yet.

The story of Dee – and Jake, who agreed to be featured in this article, but preferred not to be interviewed – is depressingly familiar to Professor Henrietta Bowden-Jones OBE, the founder and director of the National Centre for Gaming Disorders.

In 2008, she founded the first National Problem Gambling clinic: the NHS now has the capacity to treat up to 3,000 patients a year in 15 centres across the UK based on Bowden-Jones’s methodology.

We sat in a grand, high-ceilinged room in Earl’s Court, which is also the current base for the gambling clinic, and discussed what form an article might take.

The centre, which had been set up with a plan to see all patients face-to-face in London, pivoted swiftly to video calls, which remains the format its therapy sessions still take.

Bowden-Jones has been pushing for urgent extra funding and the clinic has taken the difficult decision to pause family work: this has brought the assessment waiting time down from over a year to three months.

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