Recall in the previous blog that I remarked about a strong tendency for mental health professionals to make addictions out of non-substance-abuse-based excessive behavior patterns. This addictifying habit (should I say, addiction?) covers excesses (an ambiguous metric, to be sure) in such areas as sex, gambling, certain eating disorders, athletics, exercise, drugs, shopping, even television watching. The most recent culprit is the Internet and its excessive use, sometimes to the point of exhaustion, death, suicide, and in rare cases, murder.
It was also previously noted that a number of mental health and addiction experts often look askance at this addictification epidemic. They suggest that people who do repetitive, compulsive even harmful behaviors are often people who already have behavior control problems and simply find an outlet or focus in hedonic (reduces pain or increases pleasure ) feedback arenas like sex or gambling. Pursuit of these activities can eventually constitute a life style and radically simplify life and its complex demands.
Drugs, alcohol, sex, gambling, these are heavy baggage, sin-related substances and activities. Curing them is doing the Lord's work, which is one reason why religion-based groups like AA found so much public approval. The scourge of so many families, these very destructive habits had the smell of darker forces in them; the devil's work against which human will was often impotent to resist.
But what of modern day, technology-inspired addictions? Are divine forces operating here too? If not, can the connection be engineered? According to this non-physiological branch of addiction literature, those who fall into a category of Internet addiction or abuse (IA) display "classic" markers, i.e., behavior patterns that tend to show up in a variety of the "sin" addictions, like drug or sex or gambling. When applied to Internet Abuse (IA), these markers are as follows:
1. Preoccupation with the Internet use
2. Symptoms of tolerance and withdrawal,
3. Unsuccessful attempts to cut back on use
4. Using the Internet to alter mood
5. Use causes disruption of productive life patterns
These markers are in no way peculiar to the electronic world of the Internet. Other media devices have captivated the attention of "the addictifiers." Cell phones and Blackberries and, one can only presume, Apple iPhones, are but the latest phone incarnations to boldly and fashionably capture the time and imagination of adolescents and young adults. But before cell phones, before text messaging, and before the Internet, there was television.
For years numerous studies of television watching invited the same symptom list for excessive users (40-50+ hours per week), invited the electronic drug metaphor. But people like communications theorist Jib Fowles, who disagreed with such substance abuse-TV analogies, argued that the reason people find it hard to kick the TV habit is that TV is (or was), in effect, the better mousetrap. It did the daily, entertainment-information job better than any other medium then on the scene. Other communications theorists, like Charles Winick, argued in a similar fashion regarding the value of TV and why it's a habit so hard to kick: TV performed so many entertainment-informational-distraction-life structuring functions so well and all in one electronic package, it became a pivot point for many people's daily lives: Today in the morning, Oprah in the afternoon, Desperate Housewives in the evening, and The Tonight Show before dreaming about Jack Bauer.
People really love their television. So, when participating in a social experiment with monetary incentives for each day they stayed off the "juice," many TV families reported serious problems. Bereft of their TV, family fights started, boredom set in, and some even sunk into depression. For many it was just too much. So, rather than kick TV, they kicked the experiment.
Curiously though (or maybe obviously, in hindsight), these people who went cold turkey with their TV habit and suffered the so-called withdrawal pangs, within weeks restructured their lives and developed a new "normal" life style, engaging in other diversionary, informative or entertainment behaviors and activities in lieu of turning on the tube. Addiction? Really?
So, it turned out, what looked like a real addiction, what looked like a process of painful "withdrawal" from this electronic juice was, in reality, only psychosocial dislocation akin, not unreasonably, to the psychological unmooring when a mother suddenly disappears or has to leave a family for an extended period of time. The Atoms Family decays, electrons fly apart and chaos ensues. (Yes, are those who find a total life-escape, an engulfing womb in TV or in movies, a state of being sometimes called "reel life." But that invokes a different dynamic than that which is being discussed here.)
Using this prior history of so-called electronic addictions as it applied to TV, how does the Internet addiction stack up?
Based on self-report information, researchers Morahan-Martin and Schumacher found that the social aspects of Internet use differentiates those who were classified as Internet Abusers (IA) from other Internet users. They found that those designated as IA tended to also suffer from interpersonal problems such as loneliness, social anxiety, depression, shyness, introversion, the list is long. Those who were IA were more likely to:
1. exhibit increased social confidence online than others
2. say that going online has made it easier to make friends
3. say they have a network of online friends
4. say they are friendlier and open up more to people online than in real life.
5. find Net to be socially liberating
6. feel they are more themselves on line
7. have more fun with people they know online
8. share intimate secrets online
9. prefer online to face-to-face (FtF) communications
10. say they know most of their friends from being online
11. say online friends understand them better than others
Perhaps it comes as no surprise, then, that some have called the Internet the Prozac of social communications.
All these Internet computer mediated interaction (CMI) benefits appear to accrue to those who find FtF interaction unrewarding or even punishing but still want to engage in social interaction and find the online experience affording them that opportunity. Yet clinicians and researchers still designate people who derive these benefits as Internet abusers, still offer a disease etiology for them because of their correlation with other less optimized traits. (But, of course, correlation, as we were all taught in statistics, is not causality.) They still find the devil lurking in the shadows.
Part of this curious classification penchant has to do with the question of whether or not lonely, shy, introverted, or socially anxious people are attracted to the Internet or whether the Internet, with its array of CMI systems and forums, allows someone who is socially uncomfortable and awkward to easily and expansively avoid FtF while having these interactions. The problem then becomes that, in doing so, the abuser further reinforces a whole category of avoidant behaviors expressed as a reluctance to engage in FtF social exchanges.
And it's true that for most socially uncomfortable people, even agoraphobics, technology has made things easier (rent the movie Inside/Out to watch a case study of technology-enabling comfort as an agoraphobic). Yet for some, as the research also shows, once the ease of prolonged interaction on the Internet is cemented, opportunities are opened up for these relationships to advance to the next level, i.e., face to face interactions. I personally knew some people who advanced beyond that to cohabitation and ultimately to marriage. (Yes, they text-message each other while in the house ... but that's another story.)
I would guess that it is here, at the nexus of suffering vs. acclimating via the Internet to social dysfunctions like phobias or social anxiety or loneliness, or shyness, that mental health workers may have a point.
