Texting is not a Mental “disorder”!

Take Your Mental Disorders and Your Psych Drugs and Your UnScientific Diagnostic & Statistical Manual and Shove Them! Petition to The American Psychiatric Association and Psych Drug Manufacturers.

Actually, I think they are primarily culture-based phenomena. Don’t see the source? Just turn on kids television for an hour. Or go to a movie. Everything is fast cuts, bite sized segments of information, and stimulus overload. I’m not saying it’s all bad, but back in the day when television and film media actually did stuff like have a single camera shot lasting several minutes, and commercials weren’t just hyper-sequenced series of images flashed on the screen, there was basically no incidence of ADD / ADHD. Now kids are subjected to hours and hours of this stuff every day, and then the adults wonder why they have no attention spans to speak of. Our media culture has created this phenomena, and of course rather than address the root cause we prefer to medicate the symptoms, because it’s easier. Too bad for the kids, though, whose parents don’t have the sense to turn off the TV.

I totally here where you are coming from…but I do have some feedback.

1. It sounds like you main issues are with organized psychology and psychiatry as a whole (which is very closely linked to bid pharma) …generally I agree with you.

2. ADD and ADHD are the most over diagnosed “diseases” in the country. I am not trying to bust anyone’s balls, but 5 year old should be on mood altering drugs. The last stats I saw showed 20% of males between the ages 5 and 11 are on Aderol or Ritalin…not good. If 20% of people do something is normal behavior, if .05% of people do something it is a disease. We are talking behavior, it is very subjective. I am cool with adults taking drugs to help them concentrate, self medication is the American way…I am not cool with adults giving kids drugs b/c they aren’t getting the grades their parents want them to get or behaving in a way that makes a teachers life easier…but I am getting way off topic.

3. “Addiction holds a negative connotation for the majority of people who hear the word. How many parents will want to hear that their children are addicted or have a “disorder” and are “abnormal”?”
–> this is a clear statement that shows that you are going off gut instinct, not medical knowledge, which again is fine. Your heart is in the right place, it is just irrelevant. Weird people are what make the world go-round, we can’t diagnose and medicate that away…that is what you are trying to say (I think).

Note: ADD and ADHD are just as much a bi-product of our uber-competitive culture as they are brain based disease. There is a saying in medicine, “correlation doesn’t equal causation”. There is no test for ADD or ADHD, no gene, no visible brain behavior on a cat scan or EKG. Then how can we know it is there? Remember, diseases have causes, clearcut, pathological causes. It wasn’t that long ago (as late as 1940) that we were locking up and “circumcising” women for opening enjoying sex…it was called “hysteria”…now that word meas something else. This doesn’t mean that ADD and ADHD as a behavior types don’t exist, it just means that it is over diagnosed and prescribed.

I am not suggesting we start treating “internet addiction”, I am only suggesting that it fits the criteria for a “addiction”.

Anyway, this is well within the “everything is a disorder, therefore everyone is ill, therefore everyone needs medicine” territory. Psychiatrists are bound to agree. Pharmaceutical companies are bound to agree. People unwilling to take responsibility for themselves - which is a lot of people - are bound to agree. What are the rest of us supposed to do? Not much point trying to disagree - after all, we’re not psychiatrists, what do we know.

Video Game Addicticion on the other hand is much worse, because that basically switches off parts of the brain. At least on the Internet you could be blogging or reading something or making a living like you and I

Speaking of our dependence on connectivity… here’s a book worth reading: “Feed” by M.T. Anderson: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0763622591

I’m totally addicitted. Not even working for a few months and the sweet siren call of gmail , and web surfing continues to seduce me :-).

If you have less sex than me you are sexually repressed and mentally ill and obviously need therapy.

If you have more sex than me you are a pervert and a sex addict and mentally ill and obviously need therapy.

I suspect it’s the same sort of thinking with internet. And I don’t care anyway because I make 100% of my living on internet. Without internet, I’m back to framing houses. Oh, wait…

I think it is a great idea sign me up!

So … the question is: People like me that make our living architecting and managing teams of developers all over the world (or at least in two countries) are we doubly disordered since we spend twice the amount of time and use multiple communication tools simultaneously and can carry IM conversation with 6 people at the same time in three languages??

Boy … am I in trouble now!! My wife has been telling me for years that there was something mentally wrong with me. Let’s keep it secret from her, please. I really do not want her to tell me “I TOLD YOU SO!!!”

I also don’t think you can treat an Internet addict the same way you treat a drug addict or an alcoholic. I don’t think Internet addiction can be treated actually… Internet is just so cool! Why spend less time on it?

I don’t place much merit in conventional psychology/psychiatry. Although these people may be able to categorize prevalent behavior occurring in a set number of people (whichever number the gods of the field have preordained), I find it excessively arrogant that they classify instances of significant social phenomena as “addiction”.

Addiction holds a negative connotation for the majority of people who hear the word. How many parents will want to hear that their children are addicted or have a “disorder” and are “abnormal”?

Actually, the real question is, how many people will be willing to pay for their children to be “fixed”? Trust me, these professionals (paid to do their job) know how people react to these words. (props to the pharma joke Duncan)

Now don’t get me wrong, there are worthwhile “disorders” that need to be treated - since there is little room for them in contemporary society. But let’s get real, ADD is a disorder? Stop defining new world social occurrences by old world standards - this is the information age - there’s an overabundance of information and innumerable channels to obtain it (even with or without conscious effort).

Respectful weight should instead be placed on the combined field of psychology and economics (regarding individual incentive) - which in turn should heed physical scientific principles. I guess the closest application would be game theory.

The human genome project will also be of great use in this field once the application scales and is next followed by a resolution between the medical practices and insurance firms’ inevitable conflict of interest.