Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. A brain stuff is Christian Seger. In South Korea, public health officials have identified internet addiction as a full blown national epidemic. An estimated one in ten Korean teenagers is believed to be in the grips of an online addiction, mostly gaming, but also pornography and social media, and the Korean government spends millions of dollars to help kids get clean at
hundreds of residential rehab centers. The problem maybe even worse in China, where state agencies estimate that twenty four million youth are hooked on the Internet, sometimes spending three days straight encrowded cyber cafes on gaming vendors. China was the first to recognize internet addiction as a clinical disorder in two thousand eight, and has tried to curb the problem through military style boot camps that some critics equate to prisons.
Controversial tactics have led to several deaths, most recently an eighteen year old who is allegedly beaten to death within forty eight hours of checking in to a Chinese rehab facility. Now, outside of Asia, internet addiction is still met with some
skepticism by the public and the psychiatric community. Citing the latest research on internet addiction in Western countries, the American Psychiatric Association says that point three to one percent of the general population might qualify for a potential acute diagnosis of Internet gaming disorder. As of right now, there's only one residential treatment center in the United States exclusively for
technology addictions. Opened in two thousand nine. Restart offers long term treatment programs for both adults and adolescents aged thirteen to seven teen, and it's designed to detox residents from their online addictions in transition back into healthier lives. The decision to enter a program like Restart is almost always made by parents who fear for the health and safety of an adolescent or adult child who is living his entire life online and yes, his is an accurate pronoun.
In eight years, only seven women have passed through the program. Residential treatment for technology addiction is modeled after residential rehab programs for substance addictions like alcohol or drugs. For those that stay, Restart seems to work. According to a Restart Parents survey from only eight point three percent of parents said that their family member was able to control their
technology use before entering Restart. When asked the same question up to two years post treatment, sixty one percent of parents said their family member was extremely, moderately or slightly able to control their Internet and digital media use. That
leaves around thirty percent who relapsed. Unlike alcoholism or drug addiction, where former addicts avoid any and all contact with their addictive substance, former Internet addicts need to use computers and smartphones in order to function in the modern world, and that can be very difficult, but it's doable. Since Internet or other technology addictions aren't recognized as clinical disorders, they're not covered by insurance, and programs like Restart are not cheap.
A forty five day intensive stay runs about twenty five thousand dollars or five hundred and fifty dollars a day. Even if technology addiction was recognized by the American Psychiatric Association, it's unlikely that treatment centers would even accept insurance. Today's episode was written by Dave Ruce, produced by Dylan Fagan, and For more on this and other topics, please visit us at how stuff Works dot com.