Internet Addicts in China Can Feel Safer with Electroshock Therapy Banned

Of course internet can be addictive as it will drag you to spend all your waking hours connected either in front of your computer or with your mobile device and same as any addiction, internet addiction can be equally dangerous. There are already plenty of horror stories about teenagers doing all types of crazy and horrifying things to get internet access when it is forbidden so it is no wonder that you will easily find advice on coping with internet addiction and helping addicted people recover (online, of course). But some stories of therapy that can be applied to patients are probably even more terrifying.

The problem of internet addiction among youth has existed in China for a while now and we discussed two years ago China trying a summer camp to treat internet addicts which was a sign of governmental attention to the problem which obviously demonstrated how acute the problem was.

Internet addiction was officially declared a mental disorder in China in November 2008 because the government saw many problems flowing from the virtual world to the real one and claimed that 76% of all crimes by teenagers is influenced by online gaming to a certain extent.

It now looks that over the years many clinics have emerged in the country specializing in treating internet addiction and offering various remedies to the patients – who are generally brought to the clinics by their parents because an addict rarely will admit actually being an addict.

Yet now it looks that some of such clinics have relied on some very strange remedies to help cure the internet-induced illness, electroshock therapy being one of them. Today the Chinese radio informed the world that electroshock therapy is now banned in China as a measure to cure internet addiction because it has not been proven to actually generate positive results.

This decision comes after a scandal with one of such clinics where patients could receive their portions of electroshock therapy for all types of minor wrongdoings, including locking oneself in a toilet or secretly eating chocolates. The doctor who invented the method and established the clinic insisted that electroshock therapy was intended to help patients recover and forget their addiction to the world wide web.

Now that electroshock therapy is banned in China, the government and the country’s scientists will probably continue their search for efficient and legal remedies to apply to the internet addicts. I have no idea what they will come up with next time but I do hope that they will remain reasonable and will try to investigate how it happens that internet is becoming such a problem in the country and what the teens try to escape from and what problems in the real world send them to spend so many hours online.