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Pastimes : Don't Ask Rambi -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: melinda abplanalp who wrote (10893)	6/2/1998 4:58:00 AM
From: Michael Sphar	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 71178

Pathetic! Fortunately nobody I know suffers for this malady! Reprinted here or private and personal use: Psychiatrists study Internet addiction Mon, 1 Jun 1998 13:05:31 PDT Story from UPI / MICHAEL SMITH Copyright 1998 by United Press International (via ClariNet) UPI Science News TORONTO, June 1 -- Hooked on the Internet? If the hours on the Net become so long you damage lives, careers or families, chances are you have a mental illness. Two University of Cincinnati researchers are calling it Internetomania. In a presentation of the first psychiatric study of Internet addiction, researchers said Monday most of those that abuse the Internet have bipolar disease, otherwise known as manic depression, or some other psychiatric disorder. Nathan Shapira said, ''Whether this Internetomania is a distinct disorder, or is a symptom of an already characterized psychiatric illness warrants further investigation.'' At the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in Toronto, UC researchers Shapira and Toby Goldsmith described results of a study of 14 patients. The average time online unrelated to work was 30 hours per week. One man spent more than 100 hours per week on the Internet. Among the patients: --A 26-year old man who was harassing a female friend online required a month-long hospitalization ''for being psychotic and manic.'' --A 24-year woman who quit college and married a man she met online, a marriage that lasted only a few months. --A 31-year-old man who surfed the net for 100 hours a week and sometimes spent three consecutive days on-line, ignoring his family and friends. --A 21-year-old college freshman, who became so hooked on surfing the Net he failed his courses and had to drop out. At one point, Shapira said, the student vanished for five days and eventually campus police found him in the school computer lab, where he had spent five days and nights on-line. He said the study doesn't say anything about those who use the Internet extensively, but don't run into trouble. "We're studying people who have problems," Shipira said. The issue of Internet addiction became national news last year, when a Cincinnati woman was arrested and charged with child neglect after she ignored her children for more than 12 hours a day "in favor of surfing the Internet," Shapira said. She was found guilty, fined $100, ordered to take parenting classes and placed on probation. Like compulsive shoppers or binge eaters, Shapira said, Internet addicts "don't have control over their behavior." Surprisingly, Goldsmith said, most of the addicts in the study weren't using the Net to surf for pornography. Instead, she said, they were spending time in chat rooms or playing interactive games. As well, the public image of the Net addict as a young male computer nerd is wrong. The youngest was 21 but the mean age was 35. Nearly 40 percent were women, she said, and 29 percent earned more than $40,000 a year. New York psychiatrist Andrew Skodol, who has edited a book on impulse control, said the study may provide additional evidence that a single underlying problem is the cause of many disorders. "There are a whole lot of behaviors that seem to involve the inability to control behavior," Skodol said. "You start to think you are dealing with one underlying problem that has all these manifestations." But he added that the small size of the study makes it hard to draw general conclusions about the perils of the Internet. "These people have problems, by definition," he said. "There might be others who spend the same amount of time on the Net but don't have any problems."