Comments on: Internet addiction nonsense hits the AJP

By: Acleron

Acleron — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 00:15:35 +0000

More woo woo doctors wanting work

By: Vaughan

Vaughan — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 14:25:44 +0000

You need to define what you mean by an ‘addiction’. It is not simply being “soothed by elected activities that are repeated over and over again”. Otherwise, we’d have to diagnose everyone who has a hobby as an addict.
Addiction assumes that there is a causal link between the activity and the negative consequences. There is no evidence for this for the internet.
Furthermore, the internet is not an activity, it is a medium of communication. So you need to specify what activities people are doing to say what someone is addicted to. As far as I have read, none of the ‘diagnostic criteria’ specify activities.
So a person putting in loads of hours to launch a business, a compulsive online sexual predator, a manager of a busy fansite, an avid gamer, a shy person who only feels able to meet people in chat rooms, or a person wanting to keep in touch with their friends across the world could all be diagnosed with ‘internet addiction’.
I hope you can see that classifying these people together tells us nothing and, in some cases, it pathologises perfectly functional and healthy people as having a major mental illness.
Of course all rewarding things will share some neurological similarities, but you need to start with a coherent concept to compare it with something else otherwise your comparison is meaningless.

By: Stupete_gentes

Stupete_gentes — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 13:33:31 +0000

Am I delusionnal when I think that Addiction is not per se in the substance but in the capacity of the brain to get soothed by elected activities that are repeated over and over again. Like placebo effect wich effects derive from the belief that a substance will act on a certain way. Even people drinking water in presence of drunk persons will act act as if they were drunk and believe they are, I won‚Äôt teach you that. The best exemple may be pathological gambling wich consequences may be traumendous and wich shows the similar dialectic between tension and relief. From a neurological perspective, I don‚Äôt understand your opposition to the idea that some activities may be addictive without involving drugs. I‚Äôm not refering here to the political stacnce made by some of the proponent of an internet addiction. Just the fact. But maybe I miss some important knowledge.
Thanks