CBT Treatment for Internet Gaming Disorder

The study is designed as a two-armed randomized controlled trial. After inclusion, every participant will be offered an overview of the participant´s psychosocial circumstances. Thereafter, the participants will be randomized to one of the two arms.

The main arm includes individual CBT treatment following a module-based manual. The manual includes nine main modules and three optional modules addressing different dimensions of gaming disorder, for example thoughts, emotions, and procrastination. Between every session the participants are working with home assignments, in order to strengthen helpful behaviours. The participants also report amount of time spent on gaming and other activities every week.

Participants randomized to the control arm also report their time spent on gaming and other activities every week.The wait-list control has the same duration as the CBT-arm. After the control-period, participants in the control arm will be offered the same treatment as participants in the intervention arm.

Inclusion criteria

• Fulfilling 5 out of 9 criteria for IGD according to DSM V
• ≥ 16 years of age
• Can read and speak Swedish fluidly.

Exclusion criteria

• Somatic or psychiatric disease that is contraindicating or severely complicates the implementation of the intervention (e.g., ongoing psychotic, manic or hypomanic episode or neuropsychiatric condition with severe disability)
• Ongoing increased suicide risk that is considered to make it inappropriate for the patient to participate in the study (based on evaluation at the structured clinical interview)
• have another ongoing psychological treatment with a content similar to that in the current study
• plan to start such treatment during the XX weeks that the study is ongoing or has during the last three weeks started or changed medication for any psychiatric problem.