Next Comes the Pill
Should overuse of the Internet become a mental disorder?
By Christopher Lane, Ph.D. on March 25, 2009
[excerpt]
The next time your son begs to continue playing Nintendo Wii over dinner, your daughter texts her friends for the umpteenth time that day, or you find yourself lost online, madly pursuing links to new websites, consider this: American psychiatrists are busy debating whether such activities should soon be known as “Internet addiction.”
One year ago, the American Journal of Psychiatry published an editorial calling for recognition of internet addiction as a “common disorder.” A crop of almost surreal newspaper articles followed, with titles such as “Net Addicts Mentally Ill, Top Psychiatrist Says.”
But the response from our medical and mental-health communities was closer to a collective yawn. True, a skeptical reply came from the Harvard Mental Health Letter, whose editor, Michael Craig Miller, warned that it’s “probably not helpful to invent new terms to describe problems as old as human nature.” Other than him, few experts seemed to notice—much less mind—that the flagship journal of American psychiatry was arguing quite seriously that overuse of the internet might be a psychiatric illness, on a par with, say, schizophrenia.
The anniversary of the editorial seems like a good moment to revisit its controversial claims and see whether they have any merit.
Results 1 – 10 of about 992,000 for “internet addiction”. (0.38 seconds)
See:
Internet Addiction: The Emergence of a New Clinical Disorder
KIMBERLY S. YOUNG. CyberPsychology & Behavior. FALL 1998, 1(3): 237-244.
1998!!!
By Christopher Lane, Ph.D. on March 25, 2009
[excerpt]
The next time your son begs to continue playing Nintendo Wii over dinner, your daughter texts her friends for the umpteenth time that day, or you find yourself lost online, madly pursuing links to new websites, consider this: American psychiatrists are busy debating whether such activities should soon be known as “Internet addiction.”
One year ago, the American Journal of Psychiatry published an editorial calling for recognition of internet addiction as a “common disorder.” A crop of almost surreal newspaper articles followed, with titles such as “Net Addicts Mentally Ill, Top Psychiatrist Says.”
But the response from our medical and mental-health communities was closer to a collective yawn. True, a skeptical reply came from the Harvard Mental Health Letter, whose editor, Michael Craig Miller, warned that it’s “probably not helpful to invent new terms to describe problems as old as human nature.” Other than him, few experts seemed to notice—much less mind—that the flagship journal of American psychiatry was arguing quite seriously that overuse of the internet might be a psychiatric illness, on a par with, say, schizophrenia.
The anniversary of the editorial seems like a good moment to revisit its controversial claims and see whether they have any merit.
Results 1 – 10 of about 992,000 for “internet addiction”. (0.38 seconds)
See:
Internet Addiction: The Emergence of a New Clinical Disorder
KIMBERLY S. YOUNG. CyberPsychology & Behavior. FALL 1998, 1(3): 237-244.
1998!!!
