Posts Tagged ‘internet addiction’

Push to pathologize Internet use as a ‘mental disorder’ for inclusion in psychiatry’s billing bible-the DSM

Wednesday, September 30th, 2009

Christie Nicholson
Scientific American
September 29, 2009

A quiet restaurant. Good wine. An animated conversation. Then, mid-sentence, you catch him steal a quick sideways downward glance at his BlackBerry. And the nickname “CrackBerry” comes to mind. You might think: for some, the Internet is an addiction.

Well, as psychology experts ramp up to publish the next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a debate has begun on whether to include Internet addiction in the next big book of mental illness. This month the Canadian Medical Association Journal published an article weighing both sides.

Kimberly Young, director of The Center for Internet Addiction, says that while it might not be a well-defined illness, those who spend excessive amounts of time online suffer the same issues as other addicts, including lost jobs, broken marriages, or financial problems. Young says if it’s the cause of major issues in your life, then you have a problem.

Read entire article: http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=internet-addiction-09-09-29

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The growing trend to make Internet addiction a mental disorder (just another excuse to put kids on drugs)

Thursday, September 10th, 2009

Bonnie Miller Rubin
Chicago Tribune
September 9, 2009

Though the nation’s first residential treatment center for Internet addiction opened this summer near Seattle, local experts say they’ve been treating the problem for some time.

“In the last few years, I’m hearing from more parents who are very concerned,” said Jeanette Spires, a Lake Forest-based educational consultant who matches troubled teens with the right therapeutic setting. “Their kids have stopped going to school … because they are just obsessed.”

The center, called reSTART, opened in July and is designed specifically for people who can’t kick their cyber-habit — be it Facebook, video poker or “World of Warcraft.” The cost? $14,000 for 45 days.

While the American Psychiatric Association has yet to recognize the preoccupation as a separate disorder, mental health professionals usually treat it under the broader umbrella of impulse control disorders.

Read entire article: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-talk-internet-addictionsep09,0,7078258.story

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Psychiatry’s next cash cow – Internet Addiction Disorder – first U.S. “treatment” center launches in U.S.

Monday, August 31st, 2009

FOXNews.com
August 27, 2009

The Heavensfield Retreat Center, located in Fall City, Wash., claims to be the first U.S in-patient center to treat Internet, video game and texting addictions. Enrollment in the clinic’s 45-day Internet addiction recovery program, called reStart, costs roughly $14,500.

The program is designed to wean patients off the Internet by combining traditional talk therapy with social skills training, such as lessons in conversation techniques and dating. Patients also feed goats, raise chickens and do home-maintenance work as a way of getting reoriented with the offline world.

The clinic’s first patient is a 19-year-old boy from Iowa who admitted to being hooked on the online game World of Warcraft.

While it may seem like an extreme (not to mention pricey) way to get unplugged, Stuart Fischoff, a psychologist and Senior Editor at the Journal of Media Psychology, believes the rehab approach can be helpful.Read entire article: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,543680,00.html

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Psychiatry: Redefining everyday problems as psychiatric problems is bad news for us all – and democracy

Wednesday, July 29th, 2009

Ken McLaughlin
July 28, 2009
Spiked-Online.com

Britain’s newspapers have been full of predictions this week about 2012, when London will host the Olympics. There is a sense both of excitement over potential success and trepidation over potential failure, both on and off the sporting field. It is too early to predict with any confidence whether the London Games will be a success or not, but one thing I can predict, with utmost confidence, is that by 2012 many more of us will be defined as mentally ill.

This will not be related to the Olympics, but because 2012 is when the fifth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (usually referred to by the shorthand DSM-V) is expected to be published. If previous revisions are anything to go by, then many more people will fall within the parameters required for a diagnosis of mental disorder (1).

It does not require a PhD in psychiatric history to be fairly certain that DSM-V will be more extensive than its predecessors. For example, between the first and fourth editions, published in 1952 and 1994, the number of pages grew from 130 to 886 and the number of diagnostic categories more than tripled. This led some sceptics to suggest, tongue only slightly in cheek, that at such a rate of growth we can reasonably expect the fifth edition to contain some 1,256 pages and 1,800 diagnostic criteria (2).

We have a few years to wait before finding out the exact contents. But it has been revealed in the US this week that there are already tortured discussions amongst those preparing DSM-V as to whether such things as overuse of the internet, ‘excessive’ sexual activity, compulsive shopping and apathy should be contained within the parameters of clinically diagnosable mental disorder in the next edition of the manual (3).

Read the entire article:  http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/7199/

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