The Hindu Business Line : Is the Internet addictive?

There is no denying that the Internet tops the spot in our lives today. From virtually instant e-mails to reading chapters from an online book or taking up a course using MIT’s Open Course Ware, the Internet offers almost endless options. Just as with electricity, we cannot imagine our life without it; and we fret and fume when our broadband is down just as our eyebrows furrow when we forget our mobile phones.

We hardly like to recall that before 1980s, we were content with what some of us now derisively refer to as “snail mail”.

We managed no less by browsing for titles at local libraries, trying to beat those who hid much-sought-after books on remote racks. The Internet changed it all.

Like any opportunity, the Net too has its flip side. Addiction. Some experts say that like cigarettes, drugs, or gambling one could also be addicted to the Internet.

Addiction (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addiction) is used “to describe an obsession, compulsion, or excessive physical dependence or psychological dependence.”

But it is far from being simple because the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) — the tome that is used the world over to detect and confirm manifestation of mental illness — still restricts “addiction” to substance dependence and abuse (drugs, alcohol, nicotine for instance).

What Dr Ivan Goldberg, a psychiatrist, intended to be a spoof in 1995 — his coining the string, Internet Addiction Disorder (IAD) — turned out to have been more seriously interpreted by those after him.

Specialists, such as Dr. Maressa Hecht Orzack of McLean Hospital, Harvard Medical School, who believe in psychological addiction (Internet, pornography, etc) are fighting hard to include this aspect into DSM V expected in May 2012.

In June 2007, the American Medical Association refused to recommend including IAD in DSM V. The battle is still far from over.

Dr Orzack avers that “5 to 10 per cent surfers suffer from some sort of Web dependence.” The question is, could it be a compulsion and not addiction?

In an editorial in the American Journal of Psychiatry (March 2008), Dr Jerald Block argued that Internet Addiction should be included as disorder in the new fifth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s DSM because he claims that “… research has shown that up to 96 per cent of study subjects showing Internet Addiction symptoms also exhibited other diagnosable mental health disorders.”

But could the medium be at fault? Dr Goldberg says the so-called IAD “is not a true addiction and may, in fact, be no more than a symptom of other, existing disorders.”

What Dr Block and Dr Goldberg say implies that whatever is perceived to be IAD is a symptom of some deeper malaise. In other words, IAD (if it is granted an independent status) could imply the presence of some other mental illness which could be diagnosed using the guidelines in DSM. That would mean, IAD is not and cannot be a disease because a symptom cannot be the disease.

Just as fever is a symptom of a wide range of internal disorders. A symptom is the effect, like a ripple in a pond; the cause is different, like a pebble or the wind that could have caused the ripple.

The much-mooted question is whether Internet use is causing serious problems for the user at the familial level, at work and with relationships. In other words, Internet use could be an addiction if the indulgence, if it can be called that, is “… to the detriment of other areas of one’s life.”

Some experts claim that Internet Addiction is self-corrective. That seems to make sense because Internet connection can snap at any time and remain de-linked for days together (in India, for instance, where broadband connection is widely routed through the telephone cable.)

Were it a genuine addiction, a person would rush to an Internet café to dive into the Net, and pay for the use no matter how expensive that proved to be. And if the computer crashed?

An addict would buy a new set, no matter what the spillover cost of the choice was.

Even though evidence exists that states that 2,10,000 South Korean children were affected and needed treatment, while in China 10 million children could be ‘addicts’, intensive Internet use seems to be more an outcome of curiosity to discover the unknown than an obsessive compulsive disorder.

One wonders whether intensive Internet use can be labelled as impulse control disorder.

If intensive Internet use were classified as internet addiction disorder, could the urge for an early morning steaming cuppa tea be bad (beverage addiction disorder)? Or one’s urge to check e-mail be enough to brand one as mad (mail addiction disorder)? Psychiatrists seem to suggest that anything within reasonable limits is fine.

But who defines the ‘reasonable’ limit? Could your limit be congruent with mine? If it were so — by chance, rather than by force — the world would be populated with yous or mes rather than an infinitely more interesting, heterogenous lot.