Internet addiction: A new victim class
Filed Under (Health & Fitness, Internet) by Don C on 18-03-2008
From Slashdot:
“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.”
If you really want to know what is addictive I’ll tell you: The psychoactive medications prescribed by psychiatrists for anti-depression and OCD are very addictive. And what’s more, these are all relatively new medications and the doctors a) don’t really know how they work and, b) don’t know what the long-term effects of the drugs will be.
Seeing a psychiatrist for treatment of a made up disorder like “Internet Addiction” will likely cause more harm than good if there is not something else already the matter with you. I recommend to anyone considering a shrink for compulsive Internet habits to first try simply cutting off Internet service and see if the problem doesn’t clear up. If there is still a problem, turning off the Internet wont help and the problem will manifest in some other harmful behaviors.
I mean, certainly sex can be an obsession/compulsion/addiction but getting sex from the Internet seems to be just a means to an end and sex is still the root addiction. How can Internet sex addiction be a different addiction that just plain ol’ sex addiction? How can an obsession/compulsion for pornography be different from an obsession/compulsion for Internet pornography?
I’ve been there and done that and the Internet is nothing at all like an addiction to Cocaine, or Effexor for that matter. My online experiences predate the WWW going back to the early eighties with bulletin board systems (a la CompuServe) accessed over 300 baud dial up modems. The only times I’ve hunkered down over the Internet for unhealthy victim-like periods was with the advent of high-speed Internet at home. Ooooh all that free porn. If anything, the Internet cured me as if with aversion therapy since after only a short while I didn’t care for watching non-stop porn from any and every walk of life. On the other hand Cocaine addiction never wears off.
Today I spend almost all my time on the Internet either for work, research, or entertainment and I hardly ever look at porn. Knowing that it’s always there for immediate consumption is a turn-off I guess, yet the Internet is always there for consumption and is only sometimes a tun-off. Therefor I conclude that the Internet is not addictive, it’s the stuff that people do that is addictive.
Take driving for example. Looking at the highways and byways one might conclude that driving is addictive when in reality we are addicted to going where we want when we want. With respect to Occam, many times the obvious is not the case.
