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Internet Addiction Causes and Disputes

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Addiction is a complex disease, expressed through physiological, genetic, psychosocial, nutritional and environmental factors which the addict must address during recovery. Addiction is widely acknowledged by recognizable patterns of unhealthy, compulsive behavior directed around a substance or stimulus. It features levels of psychological dependence, it may feature physical dependence, and it most likely involves intense cravings.

Proponents of internet addiction typically make up for the absence of clinical data and terminology by borrowing pre-existing text. Early researchers in this field have adopted the DSM-IV’s criteria for compulsive gambling as a model and tweaked them accordingly—a methodology that may have applications elsewhere, but in the field of addictions and disorders, should strike most people as sloppy and inaccurate.

They have cited the case of a Cincinnati mother who was so ‘addicted’ to AOL and the internet that she neglected her three children into squalor. They were removed and she was charged with child endangerment. Unfortunately, this case actually offers nothing in the way of solidifying internet addiction since too many variables are unknown. Perhaps she was never a good mother. Or more likely, she was responding to loneliness, depression, or a mental illness by getting on the internet.

Critics of internet addiction note that the diagnosis of an ‘internet addiction’ is really the misdiagnosis of some other pre-existing condition, such as depression, ADD, anxiety, or impulse control. Furthermore the term itself, ‘internet addiction’ might be inherently inaccurate, since one can’t truly be ‘hooked’ on the internet but, at most, one can engage in a pathological relationship with some activity on the internet.

While this may seem like a minor point, keep in mind that the US Congress passed legislation in 2007 to change the names of two government organizations focused on addiction and disease. As such, the term addiction may soon invite legal issues such as whether private insurance companies will be asked to pay for the therapeutic treatment of an internet addict.

Finally and most importantly, a number of credible groups including the American Medical Association, America Psychiatric Association and the American Society of Addiction Medicine have all, in one form or another, rejected correlations between these behaviors and the disease of addiction.

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