China's Internet Addiction Clinic

An anonymous reader writes "China has decided that if you are spending too much time online, you must be an addict. They've just opened a clinic to treat these internet addicts. Scarier is the head gear they have one patient hooked up to, and the fact that they think that this is some sort of epidemic and will shortly be expanding and adding 200 more beds to their clinics. In my opinion, the internet is way better and safer than alcohol and drugs any day. " We also covered this story last july.

Comments

Gonna have to face it....you're addicted to DUPES

[TripMaster Monkey]

Story is a dupe...original story can be found here.

I'm not complaining, mind you...the original story garnered a scant 31 comments, so I'm glad to see it posted again. I'm especially glad to see the pic of the bizzare headgear composed of equal parts ignition wiring and surgical tubing...I have a new wallpaper!

Seriously, though, from TFA:

Wang Yiming, 21, is a self-confessed internet addict, one of a growing number in China. He used to spend hours online each day, often going without food or sleep. His face is drawn and sallow.

I went through the same thing during my big MUD/MUSH phase back in the early 90's...14+ hours online every day of the week, and I was losing weight because I was forgetting to eat. But you know what? Somehow, I survived, and I didn't need some scary nurse wrapping my head in neo-bondage gear to do it. This 'clinic' is selling digital snake oil...nothing more.

Scary? Not really, but.....

[zappepcs]

what is scary is the liklihood that drug companies will find a pill to cure you of the addiction to the Internet. All they have to do is find a compound that not only makes you not want to surf the Internet, but also has viagra side effects. Yes, scary, but then the *AA will be supporting it too because you won't want to download illegal copies of stuff. With a market the size of China, what drug company can resist the lure of selling 2 pills per day to half a billion people?

Yes, I think the fears of certain science fiction writers were well founded.

Not a new concept..

[ackthpt]

Back when I was traveling through Brugge, Belgium in 1994 I met a couple who counseled those addicted to BBS's. I imagine they are quite busy still.

Relative comparison is irrelevant

[koniosis]

the internet is way better and safer than alcohol and drugs any day.

And gambling is also way better than alchol or drugs any day, does this mean these things shouldn't be treated? Judging the seriousness of problems on a relative basis isn't going to help anyone.

Re:Relative comparison is irrelevant

[tehanu]

Actually, gambling addiction is a really big problem in Chinese communities. So much so that gambling addicts who destroy their careers and families feature a lot in HK TV shows, much more so than drug addicts or even alcoholics. Strangely enough, at the same time, gambling is idolised - often in the same TV shows with the gambling addicts. I guess Chinese just love gambling. Now that I think about it, my family (which is Chinese) taught us kids how to gamble before we even started school :) I guess it's a good way to learn your numbers and basic maths...I strongly suspect gambling is a much bigger problem than internet addiction in China.

The main problem I suspect is the internet cafes. If the computer is at home, the parents can control its use (by force if necessary). However, with internet cafes it is out of the parent's control. Now that I think about it, it has the potential to be worse than gambling as gambling at least is constrained by money.

Huh?

[jazman]

> They've just opened a clinic...
> We also covered this story last july.

So have they just opened the clinic or not?

Please report for re-education

[RobertB-DC]

In my opinion, the internet is way better and safer than alcohol and drugs any day.

You couldn't be more wrong. Alcohol and drugs suppress your higher brain functions, as well as your desire to do anything but get more alcohol and drugs. Properly managed, you will continue to be a loyal servant of the state, since we produce the alcohol and tolerate the drugs.

Excessive use of the Internet, on the other hand, could lead to independent thought, social instability, and rebellion.

Please report to Minitrue immediately.

Re:Please report for re-education

[demachina]

"Excessive use of the Internet, on the other hand, could lead to independent thought, social instability, and rebellion."

Or it leads to playing WoW all day every day and you turn in to a vegetable. You will also do anything the state demands of you as long as they provide high internet access and long stretches of uninterrupted game time.

If you've player WoW lately you know that it is increasingly being overrun by Chinese, many of whom are making a living off it farming and reselling gold on assorted web sites. You now frequently get spammed with whispered ads for these sites, like gmworker.com.

I wouldn't be surprised if the formerly Communist, now Fascist Party, of China is putting all of their less useful citizens in front of WoW and making them farm all day as a way to transfer dollars from the pockets of western teens in to China's GDP.

And to think...

[LeonGeeste]

just yesterday I got modded down for saying in this thread:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=164875&cid=137 59610

that mental "illness" easily morphs into a flimsy excuse for social control.

Too bad I had to get modded down six times to say it.

China == Borg

[0xABADC0DA]

Because they learn from their mistakes and adapt. China *was* the asian superpower before the West destroyed them by addicting them to opium. Looks like they aren't going to let that happen again... time to print out a certain 38-dimensional figure?

Depends on your Definition of Safer

[LexNaturalis]

Granted, most people don't go out killing folks on account of the internet (with some exceptions of course), but an "addiction" to the internet can be extremely damaging nonetheless. Whilst I was in HS I saw my grades drop from straight A's to C's and D's because I was online so much I didn't do any homework or studying. So basically I had no social life (unless you count chat rooms and the like) and wasn't very productive at all. Of course, I managed to beat my own addiction by just setting limits when I actually went to college, and I graduated Salutatorian and got married. I obviously agree that Internet addiction is real, and I can realt personally to Wang Yiming in TFA. I don't really think you need a clinic though, but maybe.

Addiction that stems from the mind, and not drugs, is a real thing. I had a college professor who was addicted to running and the "high" it gave him. It got to the point of being unhealthy. Right now, I'm only mildly skeptical of the clinic, but from TFA it doesn't seem that China is "Forcing" people to go, so if a person feels they should voluntarily submit themselves to treatment then I say more power to them. Recognizing an addiction is really the first step. I'm sure, just because this is China, that people will react strongly to it, but I'd wager that at least a few /.'ers suffer similar addictions to the internet. Just my two cents.

That's not the point

[DarkHand]

In my opinion, the internet is way better and safer than alcohol and drugs any day

But alcohol and drugs don't expose you to the concept of freedom and independance. What they're really trying to stop is the influx of such ideas.

Re:That's not the point

[StrawberryFrog]

"Reeducation" has quite a history in China. The word Brainwashing entered English in the 1950s, from Chinese in the 1950s, due to the sucess of these techniques.

They also have freedom addiction clinics

[TheNarrator]

In a "perfect" totalitarian state only the insane can disagree with the state.

China's Psychiatric Terror

At its triennial congress in Yokohama last September, the World Psychiatric Association (WPA) overwhelmingly voted to send a delegation to China to investigate charges that dissidents were being imprisoned and maltreated as "political maniacs" both in regular mental hospitals and in police-run psychiatric custodial institutions known as the Ankang. (The word literally means "Peace and Health.")

The psychiatrists who staff these institutions, Dangerous Minds shows, tend to assume that their patients are mad because of their political beliefs or actions. The diagnoses made in both the political dissident and Falun Gong cases, ranging from "delusions of reform" to "paranoid psychosis," are highly reminiscent of the long-discredited label of "sluggish schizophrenia" that the Soviets used to apply to their dissidents and religious nonconformists.

Re:Gonna have to face it....you're addicted to DUP

[rholliday]

I was addicted to MUDs, too. Currently I'm addicted to XBox. Just because (before I got another job) I spent 12-18 hours straight on the computer or with a controller in my hands doesn't mean I forgot to eat or sleep. Now I didn't eat well, just some Ramen, Mountain Dew, and who knows what other junk, but I did force some things into my stomach. And sleep eventually takes care of itself. Though the random characters from a face impacting the keyboard can have a negative effect on your gameplay ... :)

A Clockwork Orange, anyone?

[k98sven]

Is it only me here seeing a more-than-slight resemblence between this and this?

Mental Health Treatment and Totalitarian Countries

[jenkin sear]

Totalitarian countries- which China aspires to, although they cannot achieve it at the moment- have historically used mental health as a way to subjugate and control dissidents. No stalinist or maoist show trial was complete without a learned doctor explaining that the defendant was almost certainly crazy (and if they weren't, they probably would be by the time the train got back from Siberia). Mental health hospitals were used as prisons for a special class of criminal- those who committed thoughtcrime. These "clinics" are nothing more than an extension of this totalitarian approach.

It's not surprising that China is undergoing an internal struggle over how to handle the internet- the net is the most obvious disease vector for thoughtcrime there could be. It's also the key to unlocking China's economic potential, allowing much simpler commercial integration with the rest of the world. It's hard for the authorities to keep a lid on it- no matter how much companies like google, cisco, and yahoo willingly participate in selling freedom down the river.

I suspect that this is intended to be a warning to dissidents- 200 beds in China won't be terribly effective- and perhaps a symbol for the other members of the politburo as to how sincere their sponsor is in his willingness to crush dissent, particularly people who dare to post anything of significance on their blogs.

These guys don't play games, they kill people.

I doubt it

[Cereal Box]

I doubt the existence of this clinic. I've noticed that all these "internet addiction" or "man plays online for days straight and dies" stories come out in regular intervals and only from Asian countries. If anything, I would say that these stories are fabricated by the governments of said countries and picked up as fact by other news agencies.

It's just propaganda, nothing more. Look at the headgear that guy's got on. What purpose could it possibly serve in curing "internet addiction"? Methinks the story and the pictures serve to scare the populace from excessive computer use (assuming they actually take these stories seriously).