Internet 'Addicts' Escape Chinese 'Rehab' Center
from the they-googled-'how-to-escape' dept
We're still amazed that some psychologists and psychiatrists have been trying to get "internet addiction" officially recognized. Nearly all the studies on the subject show that it's not the "internet" that people are addicted to. In cases where people are acting in a manner where they don't want to give up their connection, it's usually due to some other serious problem that they're trying to avoid or escape. However, the Chinese have been pushing the concept of "internet addiction" for years, with some fun ideas on how to "cure" people -- from shock therapy to detox units with electric acupuncture and drugs. Then there was the summer camp for internet addicts.Apparently, though, those so-called addicts aren't happy. Fourteen kids sent to a Chinese "rehabilitation" camp by their parents recently escaped from the center they were in -- though, without their internet connection to guide them, all were recaptured quickly (that's a joke: they were caught after they were unable to pay cab fare). Rather than recognizing that harsh treatments to cure a non-existent problem might not make much sense, all of the parents sent their kids right back.
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Filed Under: addiction, china, escape, internet addicts
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I'm amazed that you're amazed.
In this case, when under a Communist dictator, they work for the ends of the state. Throwing people into insane asylums is an old trick of the Soviet Union, at one stroke destroys the credibility of its dissenters while imprisoning them physically.
Nor am I surprised that the parents returned them, because "harsh treatments to cure a non-existent problem" include jailing the parents too.
Your notions of how societies work are sadly mis-informed by having been lucky enough to be born in a relatively free society, but there really are evil people with power who don't care at all what damage they do others.
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Re: I'm amazed that you're amazed.
Those kids that were sent to these treatment centers have serious problems, often spending almost all of their waking hours in front of a computer, playing games or chatting lasting days at a time. The parents who sent them to the treatment centers were desparate to save their lives, literally, as there are several cases of young kids dying after marathon gaming sessions.
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Re: Re: I'm amazed that you're amazed.
The amount of people that are dangerously addicted to gaming would be very small, and the few cases where people have died from it have been blown way out of proportion. It's the same situation as kids who play games going out and killing people, the game is blamed for the problem, not the underlying condition (they're bat sh*t crazy).
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Psychologists and psychiatrists
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To be fair most addictions are caused by other underlying problems. I'd argue that spending all of your time online/on WoW to avoid confronting the underlying problem is a safer form of escapism than alcholism.
Also agree with #1, physcologists very often don't want to cure people, thats just losing a customer, far more sensible to keep them coming back, or just lock them up. Although this isn't limited to dictators, similar mentalities are rife among the psycologists here in Ireland.
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Addiction
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I could probably get myself diagnosed with an anxiety disorder and get meds for that too if I wanted to. By and large, I think we've extended the definition of a disorder from brain chemistry that makes you dangerous to yourself or others to brain chemistry that makes you uncomfortable or inconvenient to others.
Not that there's anything wrong with medicating a depression or anxiety disorder. I just feel like the standard of need has become looser while at the same time, we don't appropriately respect relatively mild variations in brain chemistry as being part of the normal human range of existence.
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what's it called?
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This is a common tool for totalitarian societies though. Political Re-education camps have been common in China, the Soviet Union, N. Korea...
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Re: Yes
Quote -
When the other campers were sent to bed, around 9 pm, Deng Senshan and three other new arrivals were instructed to run laps around the basketball courts under klieg lights. By now, Deng Senshan didn’t resist much; he ran about 30 laps before he stumbled and fell. A counselor dragged him to a nearby flagpole and hit him with a wooden chair leg, which broke. Deng Senshan begged for him to stop, pushed himself up, and continued running. He made it halfway around the court before collapsing again. “Do you want to run?” the counselor yelled, strutting over with a plastic stool, which he swung down on the boy.
The results for their report an internet addiction seems shallow now that it's known what occurs in them against their own people.
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A separate survey, reported by Xinhua, shows that 60 percent of youngsters approve of the anti-gaming-addiction measures taken by the government’s censors.
I seriously doubt that in a contested survey.
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addiction
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