Rome Hospital Opens Internet Addiction Treatment Center
Rome’s Policlinico Gemelli hospital has opened a clinic to treat Internet addiction, which is characterized by compulsively using the Internet and avoiding or disrupting other activities and relationships in favor of spending time on the Internet.
The center, which opened yesterday, is a unit of the psychiatric department and has admitted its first patients, according to a statement on the hospital’s website. The Gemelli is one of Rome’s biggest medical centers.
“The disorder is linked to the booming use of the Internet, especially among the younger generation,” said Lucio D’Alessandris, a psychologist at the center. “Many of the patients have interpersonal problems: They don’t talk to their neighbors and hardly go out, but are online all night to chat with someone in, say, Nepal.”
The clinic is similar to treatment centers in Japan, China, and the U.S.’s reStart Internet Addiction Recovery Program in Fall City, Washington, near the headquarters of Microsoft Corp.
According to the hospital’s release, about 10 percent of the users of Facebook, the world’s most popular social-networking site, may develop a dependency.
Internet dependency can be linked to cyber-sex addiction and cyber-relational addiction, as well as online shopping and gambling addiction, and addiction to playing virtual and role-playing games.
Symptoms of the disorder, first described by psychiatrist Ivan Goldberg in 1995, include the need to spend more time on the Internet, anxiety and depression when not online, being incapable of controlling the time spent online, and giving up social and recreational activities because of the excessive Internet use,
“The pathological use of the Internet causes physical symptoms very similar to those shown by drug addicts in abstinence crisis,” said Federico Tonioni, the psychiatrist who heads the unit.
The disorder becomes evident when “the virtual world becomes more important than reality,” he said.
