Slashdot Mirror
Discussion of Internet Addiction as Mental Illness Resurfaces
Lone Writer writes "The editorial section of the American Journal of Psychiatry for March offers the opinion that Internet addiction is a 'compulsive-impulsive' disorder, and should be added to the official guidebook of disorders. The editorial characterizes net addiction as including 'excessive gaming, [online] sexual pre-occupations and e-mail/text messaging'. From the article: 'Like other addicts, users experience cravings, urges, withdrawal and tolerance, requiring more and better equipment and software, or more and more hours online, according to Dr. Jerald Block, a psychiatrist at the Oregon Health and Science University in Portland. Dr. Block says people can lose all track of time or neglect "basic drives," like eating or sleeping. Relapse rates are high, he writes, and some people may need psychoactive medications or hospitalization."
I definitely reject eating when I'm doing stuff on the computer, but not sleeping.
I guess it's the "new pink".
Kevin Smith on Prince
...but I need a faster PC to read TFA
I do slashdot 23 hrs a day and i'm fin &^!##(*!& NO CARRIER
I display all the symptoms, but I'm cool with that, I just want to score some drugs.
C'mon, put me in a mental institution and you'll notice that I'm allright.
They do have internet connection there now, right? Right???
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
When Dr. Jerald Block prescribes me some pussy.
I record my sleeptalking
But after a couple of days disconnected, everything is ok again.
I wonder the same thing whenever I hear some addiction being defined as "excessive (insert activity here)." Who gets to define excessive? What's excessive for me may not be for you.
...just as soon as this next web page is done loading.
Oooh, where does THAT link go?
When I was a kid, I want crazy over Transformers (1st gen). Before that, it was Hot Wheels. The Internet strikes me as one of these shiny new toys, but infinitely greater in its possibilities. But, compulsive-impulsive behavior? Why do I get the feeling that someone is looking for an excuse to live off my tax money? I am guilty for having shown addict-like behavior with it years ago. In college, if I wasn't in class, I was at a terminal run on the DEC VAX running TinyFugue and exploring every MUD and MOO out there.
There will be those who take the Internet to its extreme, sure. You will get that with any activity. But, 86% of addicts have some form mental illness? Me thinks "mental illness" has gained an overly-broad definition in the last 10 years. But, I am just an arm chair psychologist.
Gotta go, my email notify chime just went off.
Bearded Dragon
What if I had an addiction to orange juice and drank it ever hour, on the hour, or else I suddenly got shakey and had withdrawl symptoms - would they add "orange juice addiction" to the list?
Sounds like a bit of a "well, duh" to me.
Also, I love the first line of TFA (emphasis mine):
FTFA: "three-dimensional, multiplayer games users have described as "heroinware."
/.er pulling shit from the jargon file to make himself sound like a "real hacker". Gimme a break.
Who the fuck has ever used the word "Heroinware?"
WarCrack/EverCrack, sure. I've heard those. But "heroinware"? That doesn't even roll off the tongue.
Someone used the word to describe Doom shareware back in 94, but it doesn't seem to have caught on (802 hits in google vs 460,000 for 'warcrack').
That's the equivalent of a
I don't see why they would specifically target the Internet. You can have just as strong videogame addiction, or even toothpick-building addiction if you're into such thing. Why not generalize to "fun stuff addiction" or "absorbing task addiction", and leave the Internet out of the name?
It's not a disorder until someone's been on Jerry Springer and gotten into a fight over it!
Everything is a disorder. We need medicine for everything. People cannot make changes in their life without medication.
Everyone must be exactly the same!
Some areas of medicine/psychology are getting ridiculous.
You're gonna give me drugs because I like surfing the net? Well, okay Doc. Will they help me surf faster or something?
This guy's the limit!
Getting a girlfriend or boyfriend. I've seen it work well over the years even with the most hardcore online users.
OK, if you are like the Korean who literally killed himself gaming, that is too much. But how many emails a day is "too much"? How many hours gaming are you allowed? I admit that most of my friends are online, though I occasionally meat some IRL. If I don't communicate with them, I get feeligns of loss (withdrawal) But before the Net, I didn't have friends. How is it worse to have net-friends instead of no-friends?
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
/. is not an addiction! Just because it's the only website I go to doesn't mean I can't quit it anytime I want! I just don't want to right now! I not hurting anyone. I only mod down trolls! What do you care who I mod.
Homo homini lupus
People with obsessive-compulsive disorders are the last people you want to make angry!
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
This is great for the Slashdot community! No more searching for a parking space ever again!
But on a more serious note, this is a ridiculous conclusion. There's a damn strong difference between compulsion, custom, and preference.
I am accustomed to getting in some online news reading in the morning. If I am denied that for whatever reason, I feel stupid and uninformed. Oh damn my mentally-handicapped eyes for having such an innate responsibility to know what's going on in the world with the intention of changing my actions as necessary to better the world around me.
I also have a preference to check various news sources throughout the day and sometimes google message a friend a comment on a story. Oh no! I feel compelled to comment! Intellectual discourse = addiction. =( Where's my helmet and short bus?
And then there's genuine compulsion-- where someone will go into severe mental breakdown, hysterics, or a violent reaction if something is not done a particular way.
If we're addicted to anything, it's information, knowledge, analysis, and discourse. So apparently that means crazy, eh? Hey George, great manual you've written there!
I can quit any time. I just choose not to...
Even though my g/f is working on her Masters' in psychiatry, I'm utterly convinced that this field is chocked full of "fluff" and occasionally, even pure nonsense. When pressed on the issue, she'll even admit that her main reason for choosing her career path stems from "wanting to get in a field where I can make a lot of money, doing something I find relatively easy".
When you look through the DSM-IV, you see an awful lot of fancy "labeling". It's a massive attempt to label people based on their mental characteristics. Sure, there are quite a few disorders listed that almost all of us can agree are serious problems for those afflicted. But there are also things broken down into numerous sub-categories that even the "experts" can't adequately explain!
EG. Look at the various "types" of bi-polar disorder in there sometime. Is it really clear to YOU what defines a person as "Type 1" or "Type 2"? Look how often "ADD" and "ADHD" are used, practically interchangeably, yet they DO differentiate. (On things as simple as signing my kid up for summer camp, a section exists where they'd like you to list any specific medical conditions your child might have, and they have 2 seperate boxes for both of these.)
It seems to me, they're afraid of being asked to treat someone's perceived "problem" or "addiction" and not having a fancy medical name for it in a book they can look up and point to -- so they're trying to cover all the possibilities. "Hey! People are starting to worry that their kids are addicted to the Internet and they want to pay us $150/hr. to work with them! We better come up with something official that mentions this one!"
Reality check: A person can become addicted to ANYTHING. Maybe they developed a weird habit of tapping out drum beats with a kitchen knife every time they get their hands on one? Maybe they can't resist buying a gumball every time they walk past one of those machines and they have a spare quarter? What determines these things becoming line-items in next revision to the DSM? I'm betting it's all about how often psychiatrists are paid to treat them!
Okay, so excessive emailing is a problem.
But I'm the email admin for the company I work at. At what point do I qualify as "addicted" so I can get disability?
Do real junkies ever get tired of heroin? Or annoyed at stupid people for giving them more heroin?
Maybe off-topic but applicable non the less. :) It is when I just sit there with no idea of what to code, when I know I really need to go to bed.
When I'm on one of my coding benders I often consciously deny myself a break, except a couple of minutes for a smoke, during which I think about the code I'm writing and how to continue. Food? Something that can be eaten with my left hand (I'm a rigty) so I still have the other hand free for typing, although at a slower pace. One time during the summer I was alone for two weeks and I spent something like 10-12 hours a day coding. Sometimes, when I'm coding late at night and just get something working it's like I just started coding and it's back to square one energy-wise. So sleep (or lack of it) is not an issue for at least a couple of hours and when it becomes an issue I just give myself a little pick-me-up(figure it out). Of course the fingers tend to get a bit more freedom as to which keys to type, but that's what the backspace key is for. If I can hit it
If "skipping basic needs" like eating, sleeping and other basic functions in favor of another activity means you're an addict, then I'm addicted to my job, my second job, reading books, watching movies, the internet, video games, cable TV, telephone conversations, cooking a good meal, writing, pooping, listening to music, naps and being lost in thought. Maybe I'm weird, but it's trivially easy for me to become absorbed in something and simply forget to eat or go to bed - for hours on end.
And it's not the internet I'm addicted to. It is that gods-cursed Stumble Button.
... but to me this is just another way to prescribe more drugs to make more money for the health care/pharmacuetical industry.
I am sure you will get much less sympathy from the government agencies if you have an obsessive compulsion to 'not pay taxes' or 'drive faster than the speed limit'.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
Humans do all kinds of things that are bad for them, but a lot of that doesn't fall in the realms of medicine. An addiction isn't simply a medical condition, it is created from a lot of different factors, genetic disposition towards addiction having a stronger grip on the given person, environmental factors, social causes, etc.
I would say there is no mental illness called "internet addiction", there is only addiction. It doesn't matter if it's the internet or alcohol, or anything else, the basic pattern is the same: you get addicted to something because that thing causes temporary happiness. It just depends on the social and personal circumstances what that thing exactly is.
Addiction isn't a mental illness the same way schizophrenia is, but that doesn't mean people who cause serious harm on their own lives shouldn't be helped, it's just that the treatment is different.
There is a grey area on the border of medicine whether a specific condition could be approached medically or not.
To go on a hyperbole, even though I think religious people are stupid for believing without evidence, I don't think I'd like to live in a society where religion would be called a medical condition (unless of course society at large got rid of religion and being religious would be finally synonymous with seriously believing a small dragon lives under your bed - then believing in religion would be an indication of a serious mental problem), because beliefs that ultimately cause people to be more miserable or actions that cause people to be more miserable aren't necessarily medical, even though they have a negative effect on the person.
There are personal problems that are in the gray area, it requires a non-trivial consensus to reach before it can be decided whether the problem should treated with drugs or not. I guess the problem at large is connected to the larger question, "If we could make everyone artificially happy, should we do it?". Medically, it might be possible, but for me that's a life not worth living.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Addiction is all in levels, and often people will find addictions in things they don't like. I eat in front of the computer at work all the time, I miss sleep for class stuff or to catch up with friends. They don't talk about being addicted to either of those things unless I am missing sleep or eating in front of the computer. I constantly neglect my "basic needs" to do things I enjoy, because I work 12 hours a day I don't have the time to do things I enjoy like read the news online or play WoW.
I think they need to take into account the things going on around a person for OCD like behaviors. A person may be spending too much time online, or gambling, or watching TV because they are depressed or disappointed with their life and it's the easiest way to do it. OCD is they can't control it, while a choice maybe they feel trapped and online is their escape or enjoyment in a tough or stressful position.
If a person hates their spouse they can see the choices of A) divorce, lose half their stuff and 30% of their income B) Go out, be physically not present and look for another spouse, maybe get caught and divorce C) do something else that distracts you and makes you happy enough to stand it. Then if some one says you are spending too much time and have to stop, you can blame it on an addiction and be blameless for your actions (and not confront the original problem).
A 30" monitor, box of kleenex, and private office should let me deal with this crippling disablity. Heck, gimme some happy pills too.
Clearly, the guys at OHSU are just ticked at the guys down the freeway at the Linux Foundation and OSU Open Source Lab for getting all the sweet computer gear. I mean, all the OHSU guys get are protesters complaining about animal testing.
~ C.
Today it is actually fairly hard for people to get away from a computer. At work people need to have one to get emails from coworkers or clients and whatnot and to utilize whatever programs/databases they need to work. They are becoming more prevalent in schools, especially in colleges. Some people may take it to the extreme and spend every waking hour on or near a computer but who complains when someone reads books "too much?" It only becomes a problem is it is an obsessive behavior that interferes with important activities, and who's to say whether a person's addiction to the internet is due to them having an addictive personality in general? I actually love leaving my technology behind when I go on vacation because it completely is a ball and chain. I wonder how many "addictions" arise when something new comes out?
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
I have lost roughly 65 weeks(not an exaggeration) of sleep in the past 8 years due to the Internet, and me missing it when I sleep!
Who do I sue? Where's my meds.
They're using their grammar skills there.
I do lots of things too much: too much alcohol, too much coffee, too much online gaming. But every once in a while, I quit for a week or two and have no withdrawal symptoms, so I conclude I am not addicted.
I conclude there is a difference between obsessive behavior and addiction.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Have you ever read a good book or watched a good movie? It has all the same symptoms as "internet addiction": you do not want to eat/sleep/have sex and you get angry when someone tries to bother you while you are reading. Cut the crap please with the addiction-thing and do something useful instead. It's almost like saying that sleep causes addiction. It's normal. It's how things work. It's what makes us tick and keeps the science evolving and rockets flying around the orbit.
This is the ONLY area where Scientology is right. All mental health studies are bullshit junk "science".
I support the Center for Consumer Freedom
Hello, my name is Brandon and I am addicted to MMOs (one month clean and counting). I've read slashdot for 7 years now and have never been moved to post before, until now. It is ABSOLUTELY possible to become addicted to the internet. I graduated 2nd in my class in high school, voted most likely to succeed, active social life, etc... After a terrible traffic accident which resulted in the death of a young girl and me losing my driver's license in mid 2005 I became SEVERELY depressed. My new roommates for the semester were all babbling about how amazing this game was, so I gave it a shot. I spent the next 3 years online playing World of Warcraft, even to the point where I sold my character to fuel my addiction further. I lost my girlfriend of 5 years, lost contact with ALL my friends, and flunked out of college. I gave up basics like eating and showering, and am now in serious debt. MMOs give you a world where the rules are fair (generally) and you can control your environment with much greater success than the real world. They also directly reward the time you invest (especially WoW with the old honor grind), and you have to invest insane amounts of time to achieve your goal. It didn't help that I took over a successful raiding guild. If I wasn't online I was offline watching videos of the game. IT CAN CONSUME YOUR ENTIRE LIFE. I've delete WoW on three separate occasions, but ended up being drawn back each time. The problem is it's a social game, and the people I played with reinforced my addictive behavoir, pulling me back in each time. I cringe at how ridiculous I must have sounded as guild leader screaming at people to play every night for the sake of raid progress. It's entirely possible to play casually, but my achievement ethic made me push myself to have that perfect shiny character. My first character was made in August 2005 and sold in May 2006. In that time I racked up 120+ days played, so almost a third of my ENTIRE LIFE was given to that game. And I sold that character for $1,500 USD. Could you look at someone with a straight face and say you weren't addicted if you dropped that kind of cash on a video game character? Both my roommates who played managed to graduate and now have nice jobs and balanced lives. It doesn't affect everyone, but when it snags you it just consumes everything else. Just because YOU aren't addicted doesn't mean others aren't.
Exactly. The sickness industry wants everything to be a disease, because they charge for diseases.
gotta go, tho, need to log on my favorite heroinware and shoot up...
~men are from earth. women are from earth. deal with it.~
I would therefore very much appreciate it if you would maintain some consistency within your occupation and continue with that job for which you have been highly trained, namely the polite mugging of local Portland nutjobs of the contents of their wallets, and please keep your big fat psychiatrist's conk out of a subject area for which you can have no possible understanding.
Indeed, I can foresee a scenario where your lack of knowledge of the ways of the Internet may be a cause for extreme misinterpration on your part which would undoubtedly be of some embarrassment to us both - for example, were I to say to you "Excuse me while I unzip my attachment", I am sure that this simple description of the act of my saving the contents of an email to my hard disk would immediately have you reaching for one of your copious Sigmund Freud text books looking for some reference to the fact that my mother probably never breast fed me.
I hasten to add at this stage that equal embarrassment might also be garnered from such innocent requests as "Can you hold my floppy for a moment?", "Can I see which ports you have open?", "Do you inspect your logs regularly?" or "Have you fingered me yet?", to name but a few.
In conclusion, therefore, may I request that in future you exercise some restraint in your opinions of what I do whilst I shall continue not to tell you how to do your job.
At this time, I bid you fond farewell as I have some urgent command line work to undertake on my Linux computer - so please excuse me as I now need to go and "bash one out on my keyboard".
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Internet addiction... never heard such rubbish!
I could log off whenever I wanted to...
I could...
No, I could...
I'm telling you, I could if I wanted to...
I don't need it....
I could shut down this computer any time I wanted to....
If I really wanted to...
I just don't want to, OK!
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
For a while, I was worried that the medical establishment would NOT provide another excuse for people with poor impulse control who refuse to take responsibility for their lives.
Whew!
OK, first of all let's be clear on something: Internet "addiction" isn't addiction. Neither is sex addiction, shopping addiction, and so forth.
"Behavioral addictions" are mental in nature. True addiction is physiological.
Secondly, it should be trivially obvious that ALL of these so-called behavioral addictions are SYMPTOMS of some other root cause, often some manifestation of OCD. You can treat heroin addiction by removing the substance and healing the body (i.e. go through withdrawal and detox--nasty business, but fairly effective). You don't treat internet addiction by taking away the internet, you find what is driving the person towards addict-like behaviour, and solve that. Voila--internet addiction is a symptom.
I don't know why the psychiatry field is so determined to label all symptomatic behaviours as diseases, but they're not doing themselves any good.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
It seems that many psychiatrists and psychologists think that anything that is not "normal" is wrong.
However, what is normal is simply what the majority is doing. It has nothing to do with what is good or bad, healthy or unhealthy, right or wrong. For example, in the old days, it was normal to think that the earth was flat.
Which is why we have "OCD" and NOT "obsessive door checking disorder".
Being that the door checking is an manifestation of OCD, not a disorder in and of itself. If you removed the door, the OCD will still be there. It will just transfer itself to something else. Such as checking the stove to make sure it is off.
Apparently communicating, playing games, or otherwise socializing with people is wrong and bad and evil if it's done over the internet. Clearly, anyone who participates in such activity should be drugged and/or hospitalized immediately.
Having read TFA, I do agree that some people can gain an "addiction" to not the Internet itself, but an underlying facet. My fear is that this could very well turn out to be the all encompassing re-enactment of the "ADD Era." In the 80's, there was an epidemic of doctors prescribing Ritalin to children under the guise of the vague disorder known as ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) or ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder). Even I was mislabeled as one of those problem children affected (incorrectly, as my Mom, may she rest in peace, was smarter than that). Luckily, soon-thereafter it was found that I was "gifted" and only spent a total of one week on the hellish "medication". How many others were not so lucky and spent a lifetime caught in the self-perpetuating circle of being classified as ADHD? Probably many, as a normal, unaffected child that is put on Ritalin becomes unwieldy as it should be known that it acts similar to Amphetamines in persons without the disorder (thus, making them appear as though they have ADHD). It is not unfathomable to believe that a doctor at that point would simply recommend to UP the dosage because it would appear to not be working.
/.'ers may recognize such a feat as being "dedicated" and "tenacious" (not addicted), try explaining that to a psychiatrist who knows nothing of technology. Worse off is the fact that many parents of a supposed problem child are also equally inept when it comes to understanding when technology. A parent will see that their child, male or female, which appear to be obsessed with the computer will use such blanket terms when describing the problem to others that it will easily condone the [mis]diagnosis of "Internet Addiction."
I can see an epidemic coming where psychiatrists mislabel many curious or inquisitive (even "gifted") children as being addicted to the Internet. I myself, when I was younger, neglected food, water, sleep, and many other social activities in favor of gaining an online presence with the open-source community. You might say, "that's not an addiction to the Internet, because you were actively learning and producing worthwhile substance for which you can earn a living." However, fellow
Further, I would say that based on how society views gender roles in relation to the tech-field, we could start seeing an overwhelming number of females under some sort of psychoactive regimen because it is deemed acceptable for males to have a high preoccupation with computers and not females.
Personally, I believe that this guy is a quack and should be rebuked by his peers. Any well read or decent psychiatrist knows that there are addictive personalities. These types of personalities crave the by-product of the detrimental activity. Simply because the Internet is pervasive, doesn't mean it is the driving force behind the addiction nor does it mean that it is the subject of the addiction in every person. His reasoning behind making such a remark is probably founded by, and even possibly bolstered by such statements as "every person who drinks or enjoys alcohol to the point that it impacts their life in a negative way, is an alcoholic." Though I would agree with the latter statement, I would disagree that it is a relative relationship. You cannot, and more importantly should not, try to link the two. Alcoholism is closer to a chemical addiction as the driving force behind the withdrawals is not a mere mental apparition as it is in the supposed "Internet Addiction" diagnosis. Though you may crave the dopamine produced into your body from participating in a successful RAID in your favorite MMORPG or by fragging your friends in a hairy dog-fight, this is not the same as an addiction to Nicotine, Alcohol, or Amphetamines. The dopamine produced from these activities can easily be achieve through other activities and the underlying embodiment needs to be studied by these crack psychiatrists instead of trying to invent a fictitious global pandemic for which the privatized health industry (U.S.A.) can profit from.
...is there anything a little psychoactive medication can't fix?
I had to check my email, facebook and the slashdot front page three times whilst writing this comment.
-1 not first post
Take a look at this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DSM-IV_Codes.
This is the book psychiatry goes by when they classify someones
mental illness.
The book is chock full with "disorders" both imagined and borderline
real, so that they want to add the internet to it is no surprise really.
I hope it gets listed right next to my favorite: The Antisocial
Personality Disorder. You've got that when you refuse to get with
the program.
I think the real reason we see things like this popping up is generally because there are a lot of people that don't understand those of us who spend a lot of time online. I'm sure that there are some people that do have a serious problem (wasn't there a couple that let their child starve because they couldn't get off of WoW)...but mostly, I believe the internet just hasn't been accepted by some as a valid hobby. If the individuals that are labeled as being addicted to the internet instead spent the same time on composing music or racing cars or whatnot, they may be labeled as eccentric, but certainly not mentally ill.
Just freakin' great! All this time I've been getting away with telling my wife I was "working late". Now she's sure to figure out that I was just up late playing tug the tube steak to tube8. Stupid shrinks have to ruin all my phallic fun.
And the truly tragic thing about this is:
Yes - some individuals have anxiety disorders which manifest with symptoms of internet obsessiveness.
But other individuals' disorders manifest with other symptoms; gambling, pornography and sexual behavior, alcohol and drugs, collecting their urine in jars, etc.
The problem with defining a SYMPTOM as a disorder, is that someone who has a legitimate, and healthy use of the internet as a resource or hobby, can now be accused by nosy busybodies, of being "sick".
Better still; medication can be prescribed, and pharmaceutical company stockholders can profit from this! win-win, eh?
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
"Internet addiction" is not a disease in and of itself: it is a *symptom* of other mental issues. It doesn't deserve its own classification. Unlike physically related addictions, such as addiction to crack/cocaine or heroin which are caused by consuming the drug itself, "Internet addiction" is not caused by merely logging onto the internet. I think I understand what the writer is attempting to get at, but "addiction" is a poor choice of word.
My point is that internet useage can be managed, and quite easily. I would say it is easier to manage internet usage than manage alcohol consumption. Drinking a beer doesn't cause a compulsion to drink another beer- but repetitive daily abuse over a long period of time causes "Alcoholism". This is why you don't hear anyone talk about "Alcohol addiction", because the substance itself, when consumed, doesn't necessarily create a need in your body to find more alcohol- unless, of course, you are at a college frat party. Heroin, cocaine, and crack DO create this need at a much more accelerated rate, even when you only use them a few times.
Furthermore, most people develop Alcoholism because they have other mental issues (i.e, depression), and Alcoholism has had many clinical trials/case studies that demonstrate how alcoholics when removed from alcohol experience *extreme* withdrawal. Some say it is worse than crack or heroin. This is why I say that diagnosing "Internet addiction" as an addiction or stand alone disease is totally preposterous. People who are "addicted" to the internet most likely have other preexisting mental issues, for example: low self esteem, social anxiety disorders, obsessive compulsive disorders, schizophrenia, etc; and please excuse me, gentlemen, I don't think any of you have mental problems. This problems are the causes that lead them to play WoW every hour of their waking day because it is an environment which tolerates the symptoms of these diseases and to some degree alleviates them- in the case of social anxiety disorder, someone playing a MMORPG is "more removed" from the "social scene" of the game, and feels more comfortable. Finally, there are many people who play WoW all day because they have nothing more that they would like to do- and don't have any mental problems whatsoever. These people generally quit WoW with no issues.
Which brings me to my last point- I am no fan of people wasting their *entire* lives playing MMORPGs- but some of us make our living on the internet, and some of us have even been *aided* by brief periods in our life where we have been "sucked in" to MMoRPG's. Someone on an earlier post mentioned playing MUDS. I was a pretty socially awkward kid before I started playing MUDs, and then I met a really sarcastic hacker who taught me how to stick it to a lot of the kids I didn't like, while also showing me a few neat tricks. I know people who have gotten through periods of divorce playing online games- and yeah, it was for a year or two, but they *got out*, and more importantly, it helped them through that rough period in their life. I would rather someone turn to the internet than alcohol.
The reason why I think this is total BS is that no person needs a "intervention" or a hospitalization or a series of medicines handed out to them just because they spend too much time on the internet. Unlike alcoholism or other mental illnesses/disorders, it is something that the individual can free themselves of, without outside intervention. Most of the time the free themselves just because they need to get a job or want a girlfriend.
This guy just wants his name in print. Give me a break, pal. Go focus on something serious for a change.
When it comes to behavioral addictions that are not based on external chemicals like nicotine, the line between and internal physical addiction, purely psychological addiction, and a character flaw can be muddy.
With an external physical addiction, what you put into your body affects your brain or body chemistry and your body craves the chemical.
With an internal physical addiction, engaging in the behavior releases chemicals which the brain becomes physically addicted to. Think of it as a self-made drug.
With a purely psychological addiction, you do it because you like to, and when you are deprived of doing it you miss it, but your body isn't craving it like it would nicotine. This applies to certain substance abuse as well as to some behaviors.
With a character flaw, you are just making unwise choices. You may be reading Slashdot 20 hours a day not because you are addicted to Slashdot but because you are simply to lazy to face your other responsibilities in life.
The same external symptoms, such as spending way to much time online and complaining or becoming cranky when you can't get online, can be caused by more than one of these. However, the treatment will vary depending on the underlying cause. If the underlying cause is you have a lousy life and you are using the net to escape, the cure is different than if your life is enjoyable but the net is just more enjoyable, and it is different still if you have developed a self-made drug addiction to being online.
Also, behavior that resembles addiction can mask other serious problems, like ADHD or obsessive-compulsive behavior.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I already know of a few mildly disabled friends who do nothing more than sponge off the government because of their disabilities. From rent controlled housing; not allowed to cost them more than 30% of their income; to free transportation to get even more benefits.
This is about creating another dependent class. About opening the doors to new lawsuits because if someone is addicted then their has to be someone causing it and if they have deep pockets the blame shifts from the one addicted to the one with the money (see cigarette suits - sorry, but we've known that truth since like, when, the 70s, yet people still act as if they were fooled - worse we let them vote?).
Some times with all these declarations of what is an addiction or what is a mental illness I begin to think Tom Cruise isn't such a bad guy
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Informative
Set your phasers on "funky"!
I was under the impression that there has only been one death in a South Korean internet café related to video game addiction - the tragic story of Lee Seung Seop. What are the other 6 deaths this article refers to?
I don't have an internet or computer addiction problem! I can stop whenever I want to. Oh -- wait -- duh!!! I do this for a living......
Does anyone know if there are any advantages to calling internet addiction a "mental illness"? Does that mean doctors get to use more powerful chemicals to treat this. Does it give the label as a mental illness allow the government to step in and save us from ourselves?
Sure, some people play games on the internet as a way to "escape reality", but plenty of other people read books, play golf, or go to the hair salon to deal with stress.
Also citing statistics from the Korean media is not going to help. Fat people had heart attacks while doing an activity that they do for large portions of their day. I have still seen no evidence that this had anything to do with gaming itself. For further bad statistics, see Korean fan death. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_death
Of course you can get addicted to anything that's fun, but I don't see a huge call for making "fun addiction" a mental illness. That tells me that these doctors are either incredibly stupid (which I highly doubt), or they are trying to sell me something, get famous, or gain some sort of political leverage.
Yeah, so what if we're all addicted to one of the greatest revolutions in social interaction? It's not the internet that's the issue, it is the social aspect it provides - chatting, forums, commenting on articles.
Would it be wrong to suggest that the people worst affected are also those that are worst at "real life" social interactions, or who were bullied in real life, or who were forced to be quiet in real life?
Then there is the learning/informational aspect of the internet. Internet addicts like that too, they're often quite bright people (again, these people are the type to be bullied a lot, be quieter (to avoid drawing attention to themselves), etc). So there is a double whammy.
Internet addiction is a real problem. It can suck up time horribly. Piles of washing up in the kitchen, but 10 tabs open in your browser, including a few "Comment Here" type pages? Yeah, you're addicted to some extent.
It's not new. People were/are addicted to telephoning other people as well, especially before the internet came along. I'm sure some alcoholism can in part be put down to an initial pub/bar/club addiction, for social reasons.
Hmmmm... One of the symptom is constantly craving new equipment.... Does that mean that I can charge that new Epson Pro9000 inkjet printer to my Blue Cross\Blue Shield plan? It, obvisouly, is medicine for my mental disorder....
Just because use of this massive network is widespread, entertaining, and even necessary to a lot of people, does not mean it is addictive, it just means that it's better in some aspects. On the Internet, you can play online games and fight against monsters that don't exist and would kick your ass if they did, and you can keep up with current events much better than if you were staring at CNN and listening to their hours/days-late reports on the things they (as opposed to you) decide to report on.
Most importantly, you can speak with someone in real-time for years without even showing your face or giving a name, which helps quite a bit for the less social among us. I've known people who could barely bring themselves to get a few words out when only a few feet away from me, but could throw out walls of text by just being behind a keyboard. I, for one, am absolutely terrified of speaking in front of crowds, or even writing, when I know that people I know is going to read it, but I'm suddenly able to practically put dents in this keyboard when it's reduced to a probability that people near me will be reading it. And even then, I'm just 'Nullav' now.
Rather than labeling above-average Internet usage as an 'addiction' because people spend less time outside or pull a few all-nighters, it should be looked at positively for allowing the more reclusive people to have a voice and even contribute in ways they could not without the Internet.
Even if you disagree with every line above, do you really think someone who spends 15 hours a day hitting F5 on Slashdot would have been very social in the first place? Correlation != causation.
I just read Slashdot for the articles.
Everybody should really read this wikipedia article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenhan_experiment
The only people that are mad, are those that diagnose others as being mad.
0x or or snor perron?!
These "Doctors" need to outside and stop dreaming up excuses/disorders to keep themselves employed. The Reality is people shouldn't care what someone else is doing as long as it does not hurt anyone else. Examples are: From Antagonist "Your on that Computer/Xbox/CellPhone/Watching TV all the time!" Definition....Your not doing anything I feel is productive. Answer is stop buying new BS to distract your kids. As an Adult if your significant other is too busy then move on. Why do we seek ways to make life more complicated? Move on and stop taking things so seriously. SIN
Well, seriously, you don't need to assume a conspiracy here. (There might still be one, but it's not needed to explain it. Occam's Razor, if you will. Or Hanlon's Razor.)
The way it works is sorta like this:
1. Most humans are herd animals, and educated to be very "us vs them" at it. And have layers upon layers of mental tricks to rationalize anything they personally do as the Right Thing. See, cognitive dissonance, for example.
So when Mr X goes to the pub and yakks about the latest football game, it not only gives him a much needed feeling of belonging to some group, it also provides a circle-jerk reinforcement of the idea that any sane male would naturally feel an urge to go to the pub and yakk about football. So if Mr Y wants to go play WoW instead, there must be something awfully wrong with him.
(And just so I don't piss off only the football fans, the same happens in reverse too. If John goes to the pub instead of doing the latest raid with us, there must be something awfully wrong with him. And if Tom is running OpenBSD instead of coming to our LUG meetings, and quotes Theo de Raad all the time instead of worshipping Linus like the rest of us, well, I'd be careful around him, if you know what I mean. Etc.)
At any rate, people can be very distrustful of anything that is not one of "us", and doubly so of anyone or anything that challenges the rationalizations and excuses that that "us" group is built on.
That incidentally means that anything new will invariably be met with such distrust. Society has had generations of building up a status quo, and lots of unwritten rules and roles for its members. Real Men do this, Real Women do that, Real Old Geezers do that other thing, and everyone is happy that they don't have to think much about it. Everyone else is doing the same things, so it must be the right, God-given way. And then this new group comes by and goes and reads comics instead, or watches TV, or listens to this newfangled heavy metal, or whatever.
I'm not kidding. Each of those has been the new thing at some point, and were demonized and presented as some dangerous influence on the youth at some point. Games are just the newest instance of some people who just don't want to fit their traditional roles in this big "us" group, and it makes everyone else uneasy. Why would they want to do that instead of watching the sacred football game on TV, like everyone else? How we forget that not so far in the past it was watching TV (instead of going and yakking outside) that was the newfangled TV addiction that was making everyone else uneasy.
So, anyway, we have a bunch of gamers and a large majority which doesn't understand them, and (to various extents) is made uneasy by them. They don't care that you don't watch ads or don't buy enough golf clubs, but they do get worried that you chose to not be a part of their group.
2. There's the kind of people who just want some publicity, or to sell you something. Whether it's a new drug, or their expensive psychotherapy fees, or the idea of electing them to Congress. Make no mistake, these don't care about what else you buy either. They just care about selling their own snake oil to enough people, and if you're not a buyer, well, then maybe you'd make a good bogeyman instead.
And that uneasy majority from #1 is a perfectly willing buyer for that snake oil. Especially one packed as, basically, "yes, it's scientifically proven: it's perfectly normal to be part of _your_ group and do the things _you_ do. And as you were suspecting, it's everyone else that are fucked-up in the head." That's what that majority wanted to hear.
3. It also doesn't help that we have a whole game industry trying hard to amplify the symptoms, if they can't actually make their games more "addictive".
We have limited save points. (My personal record was having to grind 10 hours before I found the next save point in a game.) We have 40-man raids that take a whole night to finish, and where if you quit suddenly, you've just piss
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
television has been around much longer, much more time to study it's effects. where is THAT disorder? Radio has been around MUCH longer than television or internet. People listen to the radio incessantly. where is THAT disorder? Disorders are one man's label for another man. And we know how infallible man is.
If Big Media is the Harvester of Eyes, does that make Apple an arms dealer?
Neat
If Internet is an Addiction, then Internet is a drug
The Church says doing drugs is a SIN and will take you to Hell
Therefore, doing Internet will take you to Hell
Repent you all sinners and let's close up the pipes!!
Needs food badly.
This space for rent.
if the Dr.'s kids were addited to WoW.
This sig does not contain any SCO code.
Yup your heard it.
In 1997 the TV show strange universe. I was on several times since I knew the producers.
I was an expert on hacking, Internet expert, Internet exposing personal information, cybersex, and internet addiction.
I have spent almost every waking moment I could since I was 7 or so in front of a computer and thinking about them, I am 40 now.
I program them at work, I use them in the morning before work and after work. Mostly programming, writing, email or IM.
They have always provided me a good living, help me find housing, transportation and most of the material things I need in life, even just about every girlfriend and even my wife.
In the past 30 years people were labeled as being addicted to TV and Video Games, junk food, fast food, sex, porn, sports, shopping, oil, taking on the phone, hell even exercise was labeled as an addiction. They tried to convinces us needed some sort of treatment to be cured of it.
I suppose if we go far enough back our ancestors were addicted to tools or fire. more recently electricity and light.
Be it Gas lighting in the early 1900's or electric lighting after that.
Look at how people reacted to blackouts in the 50's, 60's and 70's.
If you go even further back, we must have been addicted to waking upright, and eating meat, wearing cloths.
I suppose you could even say these first land based animals became addicted to air and light.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/addiction
Addiction: the state of being enslaved to a habit or practice or to something that is psychologically or physically habit-forming, as narcotics, to such an extent that its cessation causes severe trauma.
Yes, de-evolving like the fall of modern society would be traumatic. Going back in time, were people didn't bathe, wear clean cloths, have fresh safe food, and having to use the pony express for comminication or having to walk everywhere to get around would be traumatic.
Someone should shoot all of these pontificating a-holes. They are really Luddites in disguise, labeling all forward progress and an addiction.
This is the very nature of forward progress, "that its cessation causes severe trauma."
Why should I feel ashamed of living my life at the bleeding edge of technological advancement, I am just an early adopter, in the future everyone will live like that.
I only stands to reason that we have evolved to be addicted or at least according to there definition, but it's that very type of addiction that has propelled our race to the top of the food chain.
I hope some day we will be addicted to Zero G, Terra forming, hyper intelligence, living for a 1000 years, neural interfaces, nano-bots, robotic servants and warp travel.
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
In other news: Discussion of Thinking Addiction as Mental Illness Resurfaces
so the general ridiculousness of adding an addiction to an activity to the DSM seems to be justifyable only in light of some mometary gain for someone. I cant help but wonder who has figured out a way to make an obnoxious amount of money "treating" internet addiction (or some similar nonsense) and is held back in his endeavor only by the fact that internet addiction is fictional. Once added to the DSM however, it becomes a legitimate disorder and thus a revenue stream for someone. I'm guessing that someone is behind these lobbying efforts to get internet addiction legitimized.
Imagine little 'live strong' bracelets supporting internet addiction recovery...marathons...etc etc. I mean cancer makes A LOT of money =P
I imagine that at some point in the past, the same analysis could have been applied to ADD/ADHD, and based on how much money the pharmaceutical companies make from these "disorders" it would have been an accurate analysis. Internet addiction might just be on a similar path, though not necessarily to the benefit of big pharma.
Whether you apply for a job with a big Computer Company who are opening their first brand of retail stores, or you are joining a big new church, or if you are attending a first time face-to-face with online group members, there will probably be someone interested in subjecting you to sociometric study. The individual is difficult to predict, but if you can place each individual into enough behavioral catagories or partitions, you begin to find patterns that are more predictable. Thus, everything you do which connects you electronically to the 'grid' is a datamining feast for psych-bots. Everytime you subscribe online and use different pieces of personal information for passwords or in lieu of signature, all those seemingly disparate pieces of info can be aggregated. Everytime you connect your musicpod to teh internets, it might be a trivial matter to send a small XML file of your songlist to the Mothership. All those songlists coupled with various other personal bits of information are valuable commodities to be bought and sold amongst corporations who want to study you and your behavioral profile.
If Big Media is the Harvester of Eyes, does that make Apple an arms dealer?
I think the reason we love the Internet so much is because it has information and other peoples knowledge, therefore to be addicted to the net would like saying scholars are 'addicted' to knowledge. blah blah drug companies... I agree people want money, either that or their jealous (kids and their fancy computers, angst angst). heh... internet, yummy, om nom nom nom.
http://www.sidis.net/nervousillscontents.htm
http://www.julianjaynes.org/index.html
If we are going to challenge the sanity of the mental health establishment, it would behoove us to employ better tools than they use. I recommend the above links. The first is a book published in 1923 by a scientist who wished to popularize his lifetime of work exploring the use of talk in curing mental illness. His name was Boris Sidis, and his ideas were apparently overshadowed by the Freud camp, so you are unlikely to know who he was. The second is a site devoted to the radical ideas of a psychologist named Julian Jaynes who presented the bulk of his ideas in a book called The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. If I am not mistaken, Jaynes' ideas are today supported by the likes of Daniel Dennett, Steve Pinker and Michael Persinger.
One of the serious problems with saying whether or not something is a disease or an addiction is actually defining the words "disease" and "addiction".
Anything that causes discomfort or mild misfunction can be called a disease. I've had doctors argue that broken bones are a diseased state. Addictions are even tougher because they're mostly defined as anything that you continue doing despite negative consequences. Thus, gaming IS an addiction because people will continue doing them at the expense of furthering their career. This is true about a hideously large number of things, but people only bother to point it out about the things that they personally don't approve of.
Let's actually look at what causes "addiction". We all have drives that continue to push us around despite no longer being useful. Our hunger can make us eat until we're obese. Our hoarding instincts (store things away in case we need them) turn us into pack rats and compulsive shoppers. Our drive to find the most efficient way to stimulate our minds (sometimes called "laziness") reduces us to hypnotized couch-potatoes. Our inner need for security (or maybe just our insecurities) drive us to eliminate the security of others and ourselves. Anything that makes us produce endorphins can drive even the most resolute of us to distraction. These are our addictions.
With gaming, there is a definite endorphin component. Any gamer knows that they get an endorphin rush and a sense of accomplishment from playing. We use this to supplement and sometimes completely replace a lack of that in our real life. When gaming is the only way to get that rush, the addiction can get completely out of control. For most of us, though, it just isn't a problem.
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
I don't know. I'll step up to the plate here and say that there's something about the botomlessness of the internet that can make it real hard to turn off even when you want to go to sleep.
I guess I've just haven't liked TV since they took all the cool reruns off of cable and replaced them with reality.
I've had far far far far FAR more "oh shit it's DAWN and I have to go to (class/work)" moments with wikipedia, WoW, forum arguments, Nethack, Civilization, etc. than I ever have with TV. The internet is basically a great big stack of awesome magazines. You can lose your attention but still immediately have something else to grab you. It works as both active and passive engagement. It's dangerous for people who are bad at saying "no."
And as for drugs? I don't know. Maybe a bunch of upright savanna apes are actually medically ill-equipped to live in this world we've built for ourselves, and only a small percentage of the population IS healthy by the standards we've created. We can either change our surroundings or drug ourselves into being OK with the surroundings we've built. Few people seem to be working very hard beyond mere complaining (guilty!) at the first option.
I don't know, though. I've struggled with very real been-in-the-hospital bipolar disorder with major depression and panic attacks. It's cost me jobs, education, and relationships. I resisted medication for a long time. While I don't doubt that psychoactives are way over perscribed (parents: hint: Adderol is meth. Don't be too shocked when your kids get hooked, and don't be too shocked at what happens when they lose their free pills at 22 or 23), my life is better since Lithium.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
Can someone tell me what one *cannot* get addicted to?
You just got troll'd!
Ask your psychiatrist if turning off your brain and going back to watching televised propaganda/distraction in a trance-like hypnotized state is right for you!
They know that people are addicted to internet, out of them there will be many who are already feeling guilty that they are wasting time,life etc, so they simply fill fear in their heads and make them more retarded than they already are.
-- It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. -- Aristotle
Here's why I think people in general are so suspicious of those of us who play video games a lot for our primary means of recreation. Most people "recreate" in groups. When they watch football, they either watch it together or they talk about it together later. Playing sports is nearly always a group experience. Watching TV shows is much the same .. this is considered 'normal' because it can be considered social currency. Status and respect in a social group can be earned by being able to exchange information and opinion regarding TV shows seen by others. Even knowledge of commercials, funny and deplorable, can be shared in conversation. Ultimately it doesn't matter what the activity is, as long as it is a shared social experience.
Video gaming for the most part is a solitary activity (leaving Wii games out of this for the most part, as it's a relatively new phenomenon), which, unless a person's real-world peers share interest in gaming (unlikely) gives him no social currency. Plus, video games are unfairly stigmatized as being children's games, which is a disincentive to bringing it up among real-world peers at all, and may actually hurt one's social status if the topic is chanced.
Which in my mind expains why MMOs can be so addictive .. the activity is both solitary/escapist AND social, and an immediate community of fellow gamers are available to reaffirm one's needs for kinship and acceptance, enticing the player's further immersion in the game, rewarding greater time spent in the virtual universe as commesurate with status.
Meanwhile "normies" (non-gamers) think of video game enthusiasts as misfits, socially inept, and possibly psychologically damaged. Personally I think one has to be psychologically damaged to be entertained by American Idol or Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionare, but that's just my opinion. I try to be polite about my opinions of other people's activities, as long as they're not hurting anybody or themselves. I don't attempt to label them as diseased because I don't understand why their preferred recreation is fun.
It's not a lie. It's the truth with lossy compression.
> even though I think religious people are stupid for believing without evidence
Thank you, you have fulfilled the requirement for bashing religion on any and all threads.
You should educate yourself on how logic works. Mainly: you start with assumptions. Assumptions by definition cannot be proven and therefore there is no evidence for them. This means that as long as you are depending on logic to work out your belief system, by your own definition, you are stupid.
But you're not. And neither am I. Since we can't agree on our basic assumptions, we are at an impasse. How about we just agree to disagree rather than being pointlessly insulting?
Love, Squeedle
Its very rarely I see an insightful reply in a discussion about mental illnesses and drugs, and yours is one of those rare ones.
I'm inclined to agree with much of what you say. It's always been a pet theory of mine that mental illness is more a societal illness (society not meeting or monkey needs), than a problem with the individual. In some cases the individual can have some flaws, but for a majority of cases it is society that is flawed. It would be interesting to see a study of the prevalence of various mental diseases across a broad spectrum of social organizations.
My favorite example of this is a woman I once met, who claimed to have adult ADHD. I asked her how she knew this, and she said her shrink diagnosed it because she couldn't focus at work, which was hurting her productivity. When asked, she told me she worked at a call center, doing billing. I don't know many people who would be able to remain on task well at a job that boring. But instead of blaming the job, we blame the individual for not being able to cope with it. It seems, to me at least, that our priorities are screwed up. Last I checked society was here for individuals, and not the other way around.
Most people with diagnosed ADD/ADHD I've met are pretty normal. But in our overcrowded world children acting like curious and active children are a disruption to social order, and thus must be ill. To spark some controversy, the same can be said for a majority of people diagnosed with, or claiming, asperger's or (mostly) minor depression, and bipolar. Most of these people are reacting healthily to an unhealthy environment. And in some absurd cases, claim it as a badge of identity, so they can be special feeling.
Of course drug marketing is only making this worse, and more tragic and absurd. Individual lucidity, and personality has just become another commodity to trade.
I don't think that, to wander back on topic, that the internet is addictive, as much as it is interesting. Our monkey brains like stimulus and amusement. It becomes an addiction when I take it away from you and you have dire psychological (or physical) effects from it. Increasingly I think your ability to function will be hampered more by our social dependence on it, than by any individual dependence. It's like saying your addicted to cars, you can probably do away with yours with no terrible effects, but you might not be able to go to work or buy groceries thanks to civic planning that had cars in mind.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
The recommendation in TFA is similar to the American Psychological Association's. The APA writes the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) which defines what's a disorder and what is not, and the criteria that must be fit in order to determine whether there's a clinical diagnosis. In both cases there is biased based on the fact that the people making the recommendation (the APA being just over half clinical psychologists) stand to make money (whether individually or collectively as a field) treating people for what they're trying to push as a disorder. This bias can end up labeling people as defective when in fact they may just be different.
An example is in Attention Deficit Disorder (With or Without Hyperactivity). The DSM definition describes those with real, biologically based dysfunctions in one of more brain processes involved in attentional processing. However, they can also fit farm more people who happen to have an attentional system which differs from "normal". While it fits the criteria, those criteria do not take into account the fact that the condition may also provide them with other functions which are an improvement over "normal". For instance, those with this "disorder" often also show a tendency to take in a problem, file it away in a non-conscious area, and later have an answer pop out without having to actively and consciously think about it. This ability, using problem solving processes while simultaneously conducting living business as usual, can make them appear to have less attentional ability based on the fact that resources are going into the non-conscious process, taking some away from the conscious process.
To expand on the concept of bias in the definition of AD(H)D, read Diane McGuiness's "When Children Don't Learn", chapters 9 and 10. Her work got her a rare invitation from the APA to provide a dissenting opinion piece in their research material on this "disorder". To their credit, APA has previously used such dissenting opinion to negate a previous condition as a diagnosable disorder deserving of treatment, that of homosexuality (removing it from the DSM in the revision from the second to third volume).
While it is possible that people with obsessive-compulsive disorder may in fact get hooked on gaming, this doesn't mean that people who play games in an obsessive or compulsive manner have OCD. The definition should not be used if it fits only one set of circumstances, just as AD(H)D should not be applied to kids who are fidgety in class and don't listen to the teacher well, but can sit for hours and play a video game that requires focused attention over a long time frame. Using a contradiction here that comes from material similar to the article was done on purpose. It uses that same activity in a manner which negates another diagnosis, making it if not functional then at least non-clinical. It has in fact been observed in testing those diagnosed with AD(H)D to show the diagnosis as a disorder is fallacious.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Install one new unpatched Microsoft product weekly, repeat as needed....
It's only paranoia if your wrong...
How many F5 keys do you press a day?
1) 10 (Normal)
2) 100 (Well...)
3) 1000 (What?)
4) 10000 (Calling 911...)
I want sufferers to be labeled as such and denied any job that might negatively impact society.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
But that is the point. For you, the internet is much more interesting. You probly have a higher IQ than the average TV watcher. My EX, was addicted to reality TV. She couldn't stop. She DVR'ed them all, Read the forums on them, watched the recaps, posted on them, speculated on them, and spent all spare moments engrosed in it. That is as much of an addiction as me spending 3 hours two nights in a row to raid the rift in LOTRO, if not more. I set aside 6 hours for my gaming online. I go out and see friends on the weekends. I dought I'm addicted, but to me she was addicted to TV. That being said I had a friend who was addicted to "EverCrack" (EverQuest). He was a pot head at the time, bought large quantities, smoked and played all day long. Didn't have a job, and rarely saw the light of day. So it goes both ways.
Memory is deceptive because it is colored by today's events. - Albert Einstein
Colmore,
For an interesting set of theories, read the book, The Primal Scream.
Untrue I say! I can quit surfing the internet anytime I want to I can even quit right now! It's just not a very good time for me, I'll quit tommorrow. Honest.
Insurers May be Required to Cover Drugs and Hospitalization for "Internet Addiction"
Mental Health Parity Bill Founded on Pseudoscience
If the Mental Health Parity Bill, H.R. 1424, passes the U.S. Senate as it did on March 5 in the House of Representatives, insurers may be required to cover treatment for "Internet addiction"--the newest proposed "mental disorder" for inclusion in psychiatry's billing bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).
H.R. 1424 would effectively mandate insurance coverage of a broad range of subjective and scientifically unsound mental disorders found in the DSM, such as "spelling disorder," "nicotine use or withdrawal," "mathematics disorder," "oppositional defiant disorder" and "sibling rivalry disorder." The psychiatric watchdog Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) says the bill is founded on pseudoscience, and Congress should not mandate parity of insurance coverage when there is no parity of diagnoses between verifiable medical conditions and the psychiatric pseudoscience of the DSM.
In the most recent issue of The American Journal of Psychiatry, psychiatrist Jerald Block claims that Internet addiction should be included as a disorder in the next edition of the DSM. The "symptoms" he lists--including "excessive use" of computers, the need for better equipment, more software or more hours of use--are as equally absurd as the checklists used to categorize hundreds of other mental disorders found in the DSM, which the House bill proposes insurance companies cover. Block further reports that 80% of "Internet addicts" may need psychiatric drugs and about one in four require hospitalization.
Block, like other psychiatrists who dream up new mental disorders for the ever-expanding DSM, not only fails to provide reliable scientific diagnoses, but also fails to warn the public that the treatment--drugs--is not only dangerous according to international drug regulatory agencies, but ineffective as well. A recent study in the journal Public Library of Science Medicine found that one of the leading psychiatric "treatments"--antidepressants--is ineffective, working no better than placebo in the majority of cases. Despite the lack of proven effectiveness, the drugs--which carry a black box warning for suicidality--are widely prescribed to all portions of the population, fueling a lucrative $13.5 billion a year industry in the U.S.
While some patient advocacy groups, heavily funded by drug interests, and the mental health lobby purport that mental illness is like a physical disease such as diabetes, cancer or epilepsy, scientific evidence does not substantiate this. There is no parity in the diagnosis of mental health problems (such as "Internet addiction") compared to real physical conditions that can be accurately tested for and diagnosed. The DSM itself states, "...it must be admitted that no definition adequately specifies precise boundaries for the concept of 'mental disorder.'" Yet, the House bill would require group health plans offering mental health benefits to cover every one of the 374 "mental disorders" listed in the DSM. Even psychiatrists and psychologists admit that the manual is unreliable and lacks validity:
American University Professor of Psychology Jeffrey A. Schaler stated, "Since there are no objective tests for 'mental illness,' all kinds of socially unacceptable behaviors will be declared 'mental illnesses.' The bottom line is this: Behaviors cannot be diseases."
Allen J. Frances, professor of psychiatry at Duke University Medical Center and Chair of the DSM IV Task Force, stated, "There could arguably not be a worse term than mental disorder to describe the conditions classified in DSM-IV."
The late Loren R. Mosher, M.D., former APA member, stated in regards to the DSM, "...there are no external validating criteria for psychiatric diagnoses. There is neither a blood test nor specific anatomic lesions for any major psychiatric disorder."
Psychiatris