Internet Addiction – How can we draw the line?

Looking through this month’s Wired magazine, I came across a 6 page article about a teenage boy that was beaten to death at a so-called internet addiction camp in China. Quoting the article, “in China’s rigid, hypercompetitive society, the Internet represents more than a disciplinary distraction – it’s seen as an existential threat”. The perceived problem seems to have taken the form of a national obsession, starting about 8 years ago, when the popularity of online games such as Legend of Mir 2 and later World of Warcraft lead to several teenage deaths. As a result, about a year ago, government officials were considering to formally define Internet addiction as a clinical disorder. While the concern of teenagers spending too much time on the internet to the expense of their education, fitness and overall health is more than understandable, it seems that the Chinese have gone overboard with their approach to the perceived problem.

The country’s first center was created in 2004 by Beijing’s Military General Hospital, a facility that has treated over 5,000 teenagers (mostly) so far. It didn’t take long until similar centers started popping up all over Asia, leading to the point where many of these camps were unregulated, uncredentialed and lead by untrained entrepreneurs going after what they saw as an opportunity in a growing industry. While there were signs almost screaming that the situation had gotten out of hand, such as a psychiatrist by the name of Yang Yongxin being portrayed by the media as a “national Web-addiction expert” when his way of treating teenagers was to administer electroshock to them without even being licensed to do so, the Chinese government didn’t take any action, thus allowing the media to describe the fight against Internet as “the Third Opium War”. The result? The murder of Deng Senshan, the “lost boy” as referred to in the article, is only one of many terrifying reports coming to the surface, a notable fact being that the specific camp’s founder had never even been to high school, yet promoted himself as an educational and psychological expert.

And why do we care? Well, apart from the humanitarian aspect of the issue, which may or may not be touching, it is a fact that the internet-rehab center trend has planted its seeds in the US, with the first recovery program center for Internet Addiction Disorder opening its doors in Fall City, Washington. Quoting the founder of the center, “China is in an enviable position because they are taking action; we are not”. While the extremities taking place in China are probably not valid concerns in the US, and while the extent to which Internet overuse can be characterized as a mental disorder remains to be determined by the medical community, there is definitely a case for being skeptical before buying into the craze. Falling into some sort of self-fulfilling prophecy or spreading such panic amongst parents that would end up blurring the boundaries between a habit/trend/phase and an addiction should arguably not be seen as an impossibility.