SHYNESS author Christopher Lane ask Psychology Today "Side Effects"

Should overuse of the Internet become a mental disorder?

By Christopher Lane, Ph.D.
March 25, 2009

The next time your son begs to continue playing Nintendo Wii over dinner, your daughter texts her friends for the umpteenth time that day, or you find yourself lost online, madly pursuing links to new websites, consider this: American psychiatrists are busy debating whether such activities should soon be known as "Internet addiction."

One year ago, the American Journal of Psychiatry published an editorial calling for recognition of internet addiction as a "common disorder." A crop of almost surreal newspaper articles followed, with titles such as "Net Addicts Mentally Ill, Top Psychiatrist Says."

But the response from our medical and mental-health communities was closer to a collective yawn. True, a skeptical reply came from the Harvard Mental Health Letter, whose editor, Michael Craig Miller, warned that it's "probably not helpful to invent new terms to describe problems as old as human nature." Other than him, few experts seemed to notice—much less mind—that the flagship journal of American psychiatry was arguing quite seriously that overuse of the internet might be a psychiatric illness, on a par with, say, schizophrenia.

The anniversary of the editorial seems like a good moment to revisit its controversial claims and see whether they have any merit.

Jerald J. Block, the Portland-based author of the piece, argued that the disorder presents three subtypes: "excessive gaming, sexual preoccupations, and email-text messaging." Given the opening scenario I described of mayhem at dinnertime, it's not a wild guess to say that the last one applies to quite a few teenagers. Nor is it a surprise to news junkies like me that the middle one turns out to apply to a sizable number of former senators, governors, and mayors.

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