Net/Tech addiction INPATIENT Rehab! (trip out/copy pasta... Erm sorta...)

Here is the link if you would rather read the copy pasta source....

http://www.motherboard.tv/2010/1/5/oh-no-video-game-addiction-is-fo...

YOU SEE...

I have witnessed this.. been a victim of it and had personal relationships affected by it.. and have been personally participatory in it..but NOW... we are talking "twelve stepping", folks.

I would like to see anyone here who is a super texter and or a super net addict try a experiment.

Do something like... go to the grocery store without your cellphone. OR maybe, not turn on the PC (for entertainment.. we all know that some folks use the PC for work exclusively.. but just avoid the entertainment parts and social networking parts. like DT or YT or FB or whatever for a day... see if you are REALLY REALLY uncomfortable.) That's withdrawl symptoms folks.

I know I can be uncomfortable, used to feel this way leaving home without a wristwatch or pager(s) etc... (Raises hand) ... but check out the below... or the link when you have a sec, it's old news but, I just ran across this somehow recently.

And please give me some of your own personal feedback! (I mean I know most of us here don't even question this... Cause we KNOW WE BE CRAAZY!)

But let me know what ya think if you got a sec.

:Heavensfield is a nerd-only rehab unit. If you’re worried about the tingly feeling you’ve had in your left arm after New Year’s, look elsewhere. No, Heavensfield–the first ever in-patient
internet addiction clinic outside of the Far East–concerns itself
chiefly with dorks who slay orcs.

Seattle psychologist Dr Hilarie Cash became interested in computer addiction 15 years ago after treating a guy who was addicted to text adventures. Since setting up the center in September, she’s had clients
from all over the US. Some of them have wielded knives in attempts to
get their precious PCs back. Others lost their jobs, flunked out of
college, created complex webs of deception, and rang up massive credit
card debts to feed their habits. Some even barricaded themselves in
one-bedroom apartments 23 hours a day for five years before they found
help. Most incredibly of all, some of these people had girlfriends.

Dr Hilarie Cash has been to the bottom. She’s glimpsed the lowest depths of nerdy depravity. She knows only one thing for sure, and it’s that the internet is a nasty piece of work that’s bent on destroying
every fiber of your sad little life.

Vice: Just to start this off on a positive note, in your professional opinion, is there a flipside to computer addiction? Like have you noticed instances of computers actually making people
smarter?

Dr Cash: In certain cases you can have people who are raised with computers who are smart and worldly. But what I tend to see is people are physically at a deficit because they’re chronically
sleep-deprived, they’ve got carpal tunnel syndrome, and they’re socially
uncomfortable in the real word, as the only place they’re comfortable
is in cyberspace. Remember that many of my patients have never
dated–they’ve handled their sexuality with pornography, which means that
their sexual template is divided out between sex and intimacy. That’s a
recipe for an intimacy disorder–they don’t know how to bring sexuality
and social things together.

What’s the most extreme case you’ve treated so far?
There are two that are especially interesting to me, because these were both young men who weren’t diagnosed with any problems that a clinician
would have spotted before they became addicted. One of them was 25, and
had been the star of his high school in a small town. He was extremely
smart, had an active social life, was involved in athletics, had a
girlfriend. He got accepted into an Ivy League school. He was a gamer,
but he just played very moderately. Then, in fairly short order, he
flunked out of this university because of this addiction and moved to
Seattle. Once there, he made a commitment to his wife not play games
anymore. He did OK for a year. But then he gave in to his cravings,
secretly – unknown to his wife. As he plummeted down the rabbit hole of
addiction, he had to be increasingly deceptive. So he created this
amazing house of cards to hide his problem. He would come to bed with
her, then sneak up in the middle of the night. In the morning, he’d get
dressed, and pretend he was going to work, but instead go off and play
the game. So after a while, he was fired from his job. But he still
never told his wife. He kept up the charade by paying his bills with
credit cards, driving himself deeper and deeper into debt.

Jesus, and the other?
The second case was a young man who, again, was not clinically diagnosed with anything. Again, he had dated before, although it was an illicit
relationship, because his parents were very strict, and didn’t want him
dating anyone. He had been bullied at school, so he had rage from that,
and he had rage towards his father, who was very strict. When he got to
college, the first thing he did was hook up with all the other gamers.
But in that environment, he completely let himself go: he managed to
squeak through the first year, then flunked out every year for three
years – he’d sign up at the start, then not go to any classes. He even
created a false transcript to fool his parents. Of course, once his
parents found out, they stopped supporting him. Then he had to live on
his meagre savings, which he did for almost five years; he was as poor
as a church mouse and almost never went out of his little one-room
apartment, or left the screen. His existence was all online. He was
suicidally depressed, but refused to abstain from gaming. He absolutely
wouldn’t stop. So we had to work on strategies to limit his use to
appropriate times and amounts. Eventually, he got himself back into
college after he wrote an essay about what had happened to him. But when
he’s not studying, out of term, he still binges – I mean, I consider it
bingeing – and then he has to pull himself out of that. He’s maybe a
bit of an extreme, but in some respects he’s very typical.

Is gaming the only sort of internet addiction you’re treating? Do you have many internet-porn addicts?
We treat a lot of porn addicts too, but they really are bracketed in
their own category. For the most part, they are men who were exposed to
porn at a young age, or were sexualised at a young age, maybe through
abuse. They’re older – 30, 40, 50. But almost universally, as I said
before, the gamers I work with are accessing pornography, and my concern
is that it’s a real ticking time-bomb that’s being created for ten or
20 years down the road.

Is there ever a genuinely violent side to these people?
There was a young man who ended up having to have an intervention. When the parents tried to take the computer out of his room, he tried to
attack them with a knife. They just backed down, gave him his computer,
went away. A teenager whose parents just take the computer away cold
turkey – it’ll send them into a rage, and that rage can be quite
dangerous. A gentler way of dealing with these things has been pioneered
by Ken Woo – he’s a psychologist in California who invented a device
that fits on the computer and just controls gaming. If anyone took the
device off, it would destroy the computer, but the parents can set it
for just incrementally less and less time, to just wean them off gaming
by, say, ten minutes a day.

Are games becoming more addictive?
All games focus on the idea of unpredictable reinforcement – you don’t know what’s going to happen when you reach the next stage, but you get
“rewards” or “treats” at random points. And people who develop
successful games have figured this out. In fact, many games companies
hire professional psychologists these days to help them develop the best
unpredictable reward payoff structures. All of this is very powerful –
it stimulates the reward centres of the brain into releasing dopamine
and opiates. When those chemicals are highly elevated and it’s
prolonged, then you are starting to change the chemical setup of the
brain. Do that over a long period of time, and people either develop
tolerance or go into withdrawal – and that is addiction.

Are you a big net user too? You don’t feel much direct empathy with your clients?
I don’t. I’m not highly rewarded by using the internet, my brain isn’t
wired for it. I far prefer my social interactions to be face-to-face, so
it’s always been a struggle for me to understand the rewards. I just
use email, really.

*How does the treatment regime work when you’re brainwashing them – is it all stand-by-your-beds and dousing them with buckets of cold water?
The philosophy is to give them the opportunity to reconnect with the
real world. We’re helping them plan for when they are reintegrated with
the real world, building social skills, all of that. We need to re-teach
them what they have unlearned – they want immediate gratification, they
haven’t learned to be persistent in terms of achieving their goal. So
there’s a beautiful house in the country where the centre is, and I come
there once a week to do psychotherapy. There are two bedrooms with
three beds each. Everybody signs up for their chores. Then they have
coaching – teaching about addiction. They have ITTA
meetings, which is a 12-step programme that they’ve founded there –
Internet and Technology Addicts Anonymous. They’re practicing meditation
all days of the week. Then there’s free time in the evening, with
lights out around 10:30.

Which would you say is going to be more hazardous to society over the next ten years: gaming addiction or porn addiction?
I think they’re equally hazardous. Pornography taps into anyone’s sex
drive or need for sex. I’m sure the numbers of sex addicts far outnumber
game addicts. That will probably continue, but I know that the
internet-based games are typically highly addictive.

A bleak future, then. You’re not a techno-positivist?
You know, I recommend to you a wonderful book called Distracted, by Maggie Jackson. She’s a reporter from the Boston area who’s talking
about how a subject you and I haven’t even touched on has turned us into
highly distracted human beings. How we can no longer just sit quietly
and turn off our cellphones, how technology interferes with our ability
to be introspective and to connect with others in a meaningful way.
We’re losing our ability to stay focused: we just want to be distracted,
and we don’t know what to do if we’re not distracted. When I’m in a
bleak state of mind, that’s how I think it’s going to turn out – that
we’re entering a dark age.

On the other hand, I sometimes feel more optimistic: I think this is a powerful technology that’s very new, and we just haven’t matured, socially, enough to deal with it. We need to figure out how to build the
firewalls into our lives that can help us cope with its influence. It’s
much more analogous to our dealings with cars. When we first had cars,
we didn’t have stop signs or safety belts. But through all the accidents
that happened, they figured out what they needed, and now driving a car
is pretty safe. If we figure out a social system where we understand
what’s healthy and what’s not healthy, society will get better.