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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.
...but I need a faster PC to read TFA
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
...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
I personally think anything over 22 hours a day is excessive.
Fortunately I have things in perspective.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
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
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.
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.
... but to me this is just another way to prescribe more drugs to make more money for the health care/pharmacuetical industry.
The DSM(the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) typically uses when it causes clinically significant distress on the part of the person, or in their work, social, personal lives.
:P So you're fine.
The DSM is usually reluctant to pathologize something unless it's really bothering the person themselves, or makes it impossible for them to live a normal life.
You have a tendency to check twice if the door to your house is locked after leaving? That's not really going to cause you major problems, and odds are you're not freaking out about it. Not OCD.
Have frequent compulsions to drive back home and check if your door is locked, occuring throughout the day, making you get fired from your job, ruining your social life and making you feel like crap? That might be more likely to get you that diagnosis.
You doing lots of e-mail for work is not likely to interfere with your ability to work.
Heroin junkies might not mind their heroin(though some do), but if it screws up their lives then it's something the DSM will look at.
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.
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 doesn't make sense to choose an arbitrary number, the central question is: Is it ruining my life? If some is on the Internet for every minute of their spare time, and the overall quality of their life is greater, or about the same as before the Internet, then no medical illness is present. However, if another person is failing to go to school or work, losing important relationships, and suffering other serious negative consequences, AND they cannot stop in spite of all the loss, that is probably an illness. Illness doesn't mean excessive use, it means very serious consequences, up to and including death. This is an uncommon illness, but probably not rare.
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
"The DSM is usually reluctant to pathologize something unless it's really bothering the person themselves, or makes it impossible for them to live a normal life."
As a counter-example I call to your attention: Social Anxiety Disorder.
Not to be confused with "Seasonal Affective Disorder" (another real winner). The definition is vague, the symptoms can describe anyone who is uncomfortable in crowds, and yes, there is a pill. It's "Paxil" which is habit forming and has quite a colorful history: faked clinical trials, numerous lawsuits, all the way to a recent snafu where they dumped a batch on the market that was Ooops! missing the active ingredient...Did I mention it's habit forming? Lot of SAD people going into withdrawal while taking their pills. It's also another one where they marketed it agressively to kids, and, if you read the DSM definition of SAD, you'll find that kids who suffer it sometimes lack some of the vague-ass symptoms.
I don't trust the DSM anymore, frankly. The number of anxiety-style disorders that they've added in the last 20 years is staggering and obscene, and none of them have hard physical causes, and yet all of them respond to chemical treatment. That is extremely suspicious.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
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.