There is a growing number of addiction treatment centers found in China, Korea and Taiwan that deals with an emerging form of addiction: the Internet. Coupled with prevention and internet addiction screening programs in schools, it's an approach to tackling a life, family, community and society-damaging addiction that is only just beginning to be seriously addressed by government initiatives in other countries.
Internet addiction in all its guises is essentially a continually growing worldwide pandemic, with studies across multiple countries estimating the prevalence of such addictions to be between 0.7% and 11% of the population, rivaling – and in some cases exceeding – alcohol and drug addiction statistics.
Enter psychologist Dr. Young, who was the first to ever research internet addiction. She wrote the first book, Caught in the Net, to identify internet addiction as a new disorder, was the keynote speaker at the first international congress on internet addiction last year, a recent TED speaker (see video below), and founded the Center for Internet Addiction in the US.
Learning skills to cope well with difficult or painful situations and having no expectancies that the Internet can be used to increase positive or reduce negative mood, should in theory cut risk factors off at the root, and thus reduce the risk of developing internet addiction.
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Category(s):Addictions
Source material from The Brain Blogger