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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.
...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):
I don't know if that helps with your definition.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
The new definition for the word "addiction" is the same as the old word for "habituation". OK, what is the new word for physical addiction, like with heroin or alcohol, where you can die from not getting your drug?
If you take away my reefer or my internet or my writing I may be agitated and unhappy, but I can still function. Take away my coffee and I get headaches and can't do my job because I can't think straight. Take away Amy's booze and she sees snakes and thinks there's bugs crawling on her skin. What do you call THAT these days?
You can't get addicted to the internet, or evercrack, or your crackberry. Internet habituation sure sounds like an obsessive compulsive disorder, and in some cases may need treatment, but it's not a true addiction.
Like homosexuals purposely changed the word "gay" to no longer mean "happy and carefree", anti-drug zealots (NOT health care professionals) have changed the meaning of the word "addiction". But physical addiction is still a curse to those addicted to certain substances, like heroin, alcohol, tobacco, etc.
I'm not negating the power of habituation. When I gave up cigarettes in 1999 I was amazed that the habit was as strong as the physical withdrawal from that deadly awful drug.
The anti-drug monsters waging their "war on (some) drugs" are doing no favors to addicts or those in danger of addiction. IMO they are a far greater menace to society than the drugs and addicts they hate.
-mcgrew
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Exactly. The sickness industry wants everything to be a disease, because they charge for diseases.
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
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.
I had to check my email, facebook and the slashdot front page three times whilst writing this comment.
-1 not first post
No. You can have a habit for something that does no objective harm to you. But when YOU yourself realize that something is bad for you (like, apparently, you noticed that smoking is bad for you) and yet you STILL choose to continue the practice -- then you're addicted.
OK, what is the new word for physical addiction, like with heroin or alcohol, where you can die from not getting your drug?It's not a "new word" -- this effect has always been called "chemical dependence". I don't know what vocabulary the unwashed masses use, but in all the years of my medscape subscription (15 now? wow.) I've never heard chemical dependence referred to as "physical addiction".
Of course every slashdotter knows that joe sixpack tends to mis-use jargon. Quite horribly, in fact. And when you correct him, he'll insist that "it was always called that way".
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.
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?
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!