Shannon: So, before we get started, today I want to ask you a question. How many hours a day do you spend on the internet? Whether, it's work or its play. What I want you to do is pause the video, give me your comments, and then replay the video. Today, we're going to talk about internet addiction. As you may have heard in the news psychiatrist wanted to add internet addiction as a mental illness and the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders. Okay, so they want to add internet addiction to the book and they have three categories that they want to add.
The first one is gaming, in another words do you play games on the internet. The second would be sexual preoccupation. Do you look at porn, and the last and the one ii consider the most ridiculous is emailing and texting. The idea of medicalizing internet use is unknown. The concept actually stared as joke in 1995 when Ivan Goldberg, a New York psychiatrist urged his colleagues to formally recognize internet addiction disorder. He was flooded with correspondence from Pears who wish discussed explore and study this new found addiction.
So, the idea was originally a joke. An another symptom of internet addiction is whether or not you feel compelled to constantly upgrade your computer, before they had computers, you might have notice that people spend a lot of time with their cars, upgrading their cars, spending lots of time, getting rims, doing all that sort of thing. And even now, sometimes, you'll see people do that. I know when I was growing up my dad one day got an aquarium and the next thing I knew he had aquariums all over the house, every room. And is that a symptom of a mental illness or is that just a hobby?
So, the thing about this book is it's not really a psychology book, it's a psychiatric book. And if you take psychology in college, one of the courses you'll be taking is abnormal psychology, and in that course you'll study this book. This book wasn't made by the American psychological association, it was made by the American psychiatric association and there is a difference. Psychiatrics is work on a mental disorder and it gets placed in this book. So, the psychiatry is a medical practice anything that goes in this book is viewed as a medical diagnosis. As you know, Psychiatrics mainly treat using drugs.
So when something goes in this book, if it comes in official diagnosable illness, which is something not just used by Psychiatrics, but used by medical doctors as well and most people on anti-depressions have gotten those from the medical doctors and not from the Psychiatrics, and most medical doctors haven't had any training in psychology whatsoever.
So, before you decide to make something in medical illness, you might want to make sure that there is a valid medical treatment for it or not. Now, I'm going to tell you right now there is no drug that can magically cure any type of addiction. So, what are they going to do for internet addiction, they're going to take your games away and once you decided your life is boring because you have nothing to do, and they are going to give you anti-depressions to make numb do it all or I guess if you are into pornography, we can always give anti-depressions, which we know causes sexual dysfunction. You might not be interested in looking at porn anymore, but you might also not be interested and looking at your wife either.
So, the one that I highly object you is the texting and chatting with people because heaven forbid psychiatry decides to label communicating with other people or talking with other people as a mental disorder where social begins were supposed to be able to communicate with other people how we see fit, any medium we want to. And if they would have labeled that as a mental disorder that would be really bad. What I really want to know is how come they are going to add internet as addiction and not television. I wonder if it's because 40% of all television revenue comes from pharmaceuticals. They want you watching television because how many times a day do you have an ad telling you to ask your doctor about a pill, to my theory, if you want to make internet addiction disappear from mental disorders as to put pharmaceuticals ads in the game.
For instance, imagine that you're in a world of war craft flying around on your epic mount and you look down and there is a big sign that say, ask your doctor if Zoloft is right for you. I'm not trying to poke find in any body after spending too much time on the internet and if it's messing up their lives. If you do have a problem with that I can do a video later on how to over come internet addiction.
So, what do you think? Do you think internet addiction should be classified as a medical disorder or not? So, I really want to know what you think. So, leave a comment, rate the video, and I'll be back soon so subscribe. See you next time.
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