Internet addiction: The emergence of a new clinical disorder (1996) [pdf]

Anyhow, being disconnected for like 3 days in a row felt like a drug user without their "fix". There was no way to connect to the internet so I could watch either news or talk to my loved ones via Skype (now you can see how many years ago this was) or just play some online game.

It was a weird experience because after those 3 days it felt like I was in a coma, I was completely disconnected of everything that was going around having only the local newspaper in the nearby town to what was happening, and since it was just local/national news I had no idea what was happening in my home country.

At the end of those holidays I ended up taking away that it's odd having your personal life and work life (I work remote) relying always on being "connected". Not just odd but it does feel like people who are used to it feel different once we don't have it anymore.

Ivan Goldberg was criticizing that in the 90s, by making that joke: look, all the things they take as "symptoms of addiction", if you transfer that to what we, we realize that these need not be symptoms at all - just a form of passionate action in something." And boy, did that backfire.

Psychiatry has a long history of being a structurally conservative field that frames the action of people as "symptomatic" when it irritates existing hegemonic social expectations; there are great texts by Erving Goffman on how psychiatric framing defends our ideas of social normality against disruption, and tends to make it "just an individual disease problem". That completely ignores social change and, more importantly, social power structures in which suffering has much deeper contextual roots than just "this person is sick". (Goffman calls this an "illegitimized state of being "away", as opposed to legitimized ones like praying or working) [0].

Literature in game studies/critical education notes that declaring teenagers "addicted" because they use the little time school and homework leaves them - later at night - to game with friends rather than sleep stigmatizes their free use of time, their social connections outside of school, and their impudence of daring to try to decide over their time themselves rather than just submit to school-ordered ideal time management ideas.[1, but German].

Ivan Goldberg was trying to fight against the internet being stigmatized in the wake of yet another technology panic, and he did it after it was invented. And without intending to, he became the unofficial father of medicalizing it.

[0] Erving Goffman, Behavior in Public Places. [1] Michael Dellwing, Alessandro Tietz Pathologisierte Sozialität: „Spielsucht“ als institutionelle Verteidigung. In: Dellwing und Harbusch, Pathologisierte Gesellschaft? Weinheim: Beltz.

And having some guidance that Bob spending too much time on the internet is something serious and should follow an addiction recovery treatment plan is a net good thing (by a lot).

They don't tell you what populations they're using; they don't tell you how these different countries are counting suicide; they don't tell you whether the methods for counting have changed over time in these countries.