Filed under: Emotional Health, Health and Technology
Compulsive text messaging, urges to get online and surf the web, cravings to play video games... What do all of these activities have in common? They're practices people do on the Internet, and one doctor says psychiatrists should recognize it as
a bona fide mental illness.
Technology certainly has made things easier to get work done. But it can also be a great distraction to "unplug" from the rest of the world. After all, have you ever looked at your watch and gotten online to check your email, only to realize hours have passed in what seemed like minutes? Making time fly is one thing, but a doctor from the Oregon Health and Science University in Portland says this habit can be taken a step further to addiction.
According to Dr. Block, getting hooked on the web has all the same traits of a typical "offline" addiction: withdrawal and tolerance and requiring more time to get the same satisfaction, for example. He also says that 86 percent of Internet addicts have other mental illnesses -- so I'm wondering if those traits contribute to this computer-aided dependency. Either way, it'll be interesting to see if psychiatrists diagnose "web addiction" in the future.
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