Internet addiction

Ben Alexander always struggled to fit in. Teased at primary school and beaten up in senior school, he turned to the internet. Subscribing to the hugely popular online game World of Warcraft, he joined 12 million other people — including the actor Vin Diesel, the presenter Jonathan Ross and his wife Jane Goldman. In the game, players create avatars in whose guise they spend hours joining guilds of other players to fight battles. “There’s lots of working together,” says Alexander.“ That’s what made it so attractive, because the social thing was something I always had trouble with. The 19-year-old’s interest in the game soon developed into an obsession. He began skipping his biology lectures at university and spending up to 17 hours a day online. Eventually he had depression diagnosed and was put on medication. He was also treated for internet addiction. Although the medical world is divided as to whether internet addiction actually exists, Online Gamers Anonymous offers a 12-step programme to help compulsive players to wean themselves off games David Smallwood, the addiction treatment progamme manager at The Priory in London, believes Interent games are particularly addictive for young men. The better they get at playing the game, Smallwood says, the more they can “progress to being someone more important”, which they are unable to do in real life. To continue enjoying this elevated status they must get better and better at the game, playing for increasingly long periods of time. “What then happens is that kids become withdrawn, their schoolwork suffers because they are not doing homework and they may develop an addiction to skunk because they are locked in a room. Smallwood says that ten years ago he had never met anyone with an internet addiction, but in the past five years he has come across ten cases, which he believes is just “scraping the surface” of a much bigger problem. He suggests that parents often fail to tackle the addiction because they think that “if little Johnny is sitting in his bedroom playing on the internet, he’s not outside with all the dangers of drugs or alcohol; he’s not out there with all those rough kids”.