Internet addiction

In this weeks Addiction Radio podcast, we take a look at Internet addiction.

Transcript of podcast (click to listen):

Welcome to the CNS pod cast featuring Dr Darryl Inaba, research director for CNS Productions

CNS: Hi and welcome again to this CNS Productions pod cast. I’m Howard LaMere with Darryl Inaba and Darryl what’s in the news this week?

Darryl: There seems to be an interesting story in the New York Times about internet addiction, about how it’s permeated and intruded onto everyday family life and every family member, where you can’t even start off the day without logging onto the internet and checking your emails or checking twitter or doing something in cyberspace. And it’s something that’s been just exponentially growing with the invention of the internet and with the day to day with computers certainly in this country we’ve seen it going to the point that the new manual of diagnosing mental illnesses, mental health conditions, called the DSM4 or diagnostic standard manual fourth edition revised is now ready to be, go on to the next edition the DSM5 and there’s a lot of jockeying in movement that they would include internet addiction and internet gaming addiction and all of that that deals with cyberspace as a diagnostic and diagnosable mental illness as part of the impulse control disorders probably or an obsessive personality disorder or something along that vein, my vote would be that probably be first in the impulse control disorder and then move on probably to it’s own standalone mental health disorder. The obsession is, pretty much like a, well maybe it’s even greater than drugs, what we hear of today and certainly reporting in New York Times is that people get up in the morning, families get up in the morning and before they shower, before they take a coffee, before they look at their morning paper and actually before their feet even gets off the bed, they’re reaching for their cell phones and they’re reaching for their lap tops and they’re going online and, and they’re checking all that stuff and they’re being totally obsessed with the internet. I know that in China,  that this has been recognized as a much more severe problem much earlier than it was here in the United States.

CNS: Right, resulting in that thirteen year old’s death last week.

Darryl: And, in some sort of boot camp, they also have boot camps for kids there trying to woo them off of their obsession to be on the internet. So this qualifies, I think, as a major addiction since so much of life well maybe not life complications but consequences. You’re not involved in yourself with your family as much, you’re going online, you’re only interaction with other people seems to be on the internet, the majority of your time is spent on the internet and internet gaming that it, it is creating I think a major, a compulsive problem with a lot of our youth. Now in the addition to that there’s like sort of family fighting going on, there’s reports say even in the New York Times reports that in families who can’t afford to have everybody on their own system. You’ve got a family of four, you’ve got one computer, you’ve got one connection, and there’s actually fights within the family.

CNS: Yeah, who gets to use it first?

Darryl: Yeah and the zoning out that people get, when they get on the internet, sort of like a descriptions of a compulsive and pathological gamblers and other drug addictions that part of the high is not so much the actual engagement in the activity and, and the excitement you’re getting out of the activity or the interaction you’re getting from that activity, but it’s ability to zone out to separate you from everything else around you and just lose yourself in that activity with no thoughts what so ever and free yourself of any kind of stress and any kind of worries in that way.

CNS: It’s an escape, not unlike other escapes that we have used through time.

Darryl: Absolutely and you know I’ve haven’t seen enough studies but I so believe they are starting to look at some functional MRI studies, maybe some Pet scans, that’s going to show I believe, the same sort of anomalies in the same reward reinforcement circuitry in the brain, in the same dysfunctions in the control circuitry of the brain as we see with other addictions.  I believe that will be the case, all though it seems like this is a much broader compulsiveness than we find with drugs or alcohol or with gambling. It seems like a lot more people are affected by it.

CNS: It does seem to have a certain pathological quality, but if so many people are involved it, it approaches like a zeitgeist, you know it’s, it’s everyone.

Darryl: Yeah, everyone has a pathology and it’s a person who doesn’t who’s a, who’s the norm, who’s the actual diseased person.

CNS: Right, right.

Darryl: You might be right about that. But, you know, what’s funny is that so many people, parents are complaining about their children being on the internet and um, being distracted not interacting with the family and things like that but what I’ve seen and what’s been reported in many articles is that parents are complacent in this, they, they participate, they actually help promote it by their actions, for instance, parents will know that their sons or daughters are sleeping with their cell phone next to their head and so they use, they use say text message or some form of message in the morning as a wake up call.

CNS: That will be our next story.

Darryl: They wake them up through that way. Families are now using this as forms as communication rather than having to go upstairs or walk the ten paces or twenty paces to your son or daughters room the parent’s just cell phone and call them up or text message or something rather than actually communicating. So you know how much is this going to be going on and how much is returning to school, is one of the questions I was asked this morning. Well what’s going to happen when you know school is going to start up next month again; kids are going to go away to college well if they’re so much obsessed with that they actually go through almost a withdrawal when they wake up. They wake up they’ve got to reach for their cell phone; they’ve got to reach for the computer, how much more can they do this in college? I don’t know. Maybe away form their parents, there are some parents who are putting a limits and boundaries, saying thou shalt only have so many hours on the internet after school or before school or what ever and that’s your limit for today, free of that burden maybe some kids will be doing a lot more than they normally do. But it seems to me a lot of kids are already and, and parents are a lot so obsessed that it’s taken over their lives.

CNS: So do you see treatment for this becoming more wide spread across, across different age groups, different boundaries?

Darryl: I believe it’s going to be necessary. I don’t think people take it seriously enough here and, and it’s as you said so much a part of American life and the internet has not become so much a part of our lives, it’s not viewed, but it’s the whole world. But in China they’ve, they’ve actually recognized it as such and as we said have started rigorous treatment for those people who are really obsessed with it. I think that’s going to be a good question, what is going to be considered to be normal internet use and what’s going to be considered to be pathological use? We certainly have defined that for alcohol, we’ve defined that actually for most drugs, we’ve defined you know what is gambling, what is pathological compulsive gambling, we’re going to have to define well, what is considered to be healthy or normal time on the internet and cell phones and what is going to be considered to be pathological. I certainly have, have run into young people here in the Medford, Oregon area who do hundreds of text messages a day. They just astound me that they can, they never take their cell phones out of their pockets they just sit there and they know the keys and they can press the one key so many times and get the right letter and put the right capitals, put exclamation, you know put grammatical marks on it, they can actually put sound effects and they don’t even have to look at the keyboard it can be in their pocket and they’re doing it constantly through out the day. So there is, I see it as a form of pathology, you know if I do one text message a day I’m, I think I did amazing and if you get to maybe hundreds you’ve got to start thinking about well what are you missing. What else have you not done today that you should have done, like maybe homework or cleaning your room or something like that and then when we consider what are the consequences because the key to any kind of disorder of compulsive need disorder is you have negative consequences and yet you continue to participate in that activity despite negative consequences so there’s going to be whole need to evaluate. Well what are the negative consequences, what is the liability for being so obsessed with the internet, what’s missing now and then from there you know come up with a good definition for this, this condition and then we can start looking at different ways to intervene and disrupt the patterns that are developed here, definitely if you’re having to wake up in the morning and, and reach for your cell phone for the first thing you do, that’s a pattern and we have to disrupt those patterns in order to help people wean off their addictions.

CNS: Yeah and of course this isn’t just the, we were talking about phones, we’re talking about not just the internet but it’s increasingly all tied together. That, that story on, a week or two ago about the studying done, with the truck drivers and, and the increase in the accident rates from texting like twenty seven times or something phenomena.

Darryl: Yeah, thirty times.

CNS: And again that’s something that you see people especially young people doing routinely.

Darryl: And, and it’s really annoying I think, and nothing bothers me to wonder why this car’s sort of just slowed down or just come to a stop right in front of you on the freeway or something, or why they’re sort of driving erratically and finally you get up past them and they’ve got the cell phone stuck to their ear and they’re distracted and it’s clear the evidence is showing that, that not just the text messaging just cell phone itself is so distracting that, that can cause a great increase in accidents. California I think was one of the first states that a, I always wonder if the, the governor had stock in it or something like that where he made, they passed a law making it mandatory that you had to have a Bluetooth, you can not be on just your cell phone Bluetooth. But you know how are you going to dial Bluetooth you know, how are you going, you’ve got to still reach up and answer it by pressing a button or something and a call comes in and then say you want to call somebody else I don’t think you can dial out of Bluetooth.

CNS: Actually you can with, with your phones.

Darryl: Is that right you, you can dial. How do you do that?

CNS: You program them in, or else you program the phone number into a name.

Darryl: Oh, and it’s phonetically I guess, activated oh that’s, that’s interesting. But the, the reality is you’ve got a huge distraction with these on the highway while people are, are doing text messaging or on their cell phones and I think more and more states, I’m sure Oregon will be another state soon and oh, I think they did make it illegal just a few months ago.

CNS: For minors.

Darryl: Oh only for minors, well I think it’s, it’s needed and when we look at, you, you know, we compare the impairment or number of accidents caused by drunk, drinking and driving, driving under the influence with alcohol, I think right now they’re showing there’s more distraction from the cell phone then if you’re at a point zero eight, so it’s just amazing how we as a society sort of look at things. It’s outrageous and people should be locked up for life for driving under the influence, cell phone… well so what.

CNS: Yeah, something we all do everyday. Yet another chapter in our ongoing look at addictions and not just drugs. So thanks Darryl, folks out there listening, if you have any questions or comments, we’d love to hear them. Darryl will try to respond to them if he can in a future program. Go to our website and send us an email from there. The website is cnsproductions.com. Thanks Darryl talk to you soon.

Darryl: Thanks Howard.