News

We ask the experts to settle common questions we've all wondered about.

Question

Is my child's excessive Internet use and gaming an addiction?

Answer

Parents who used to worry about their children watching too much television or spending too much time on the phone now have different concerns: their 12 year-olds making "friends" in chat rooms and on MySpace; their teens battling demons through the night with other cybergamers in World of Warcraft; their university students playing on Internet casino sites.

The question parents often ask me is: "How do I know if it's healthy or not?"

Many young people are going to experiment with social norms. Part of adolescence involves staking out one's individual territory from the family. The Internet provides a way to do so.

Online activities become a problem when a youth is no longer maintaining the expected healthy adolescent achievements, such as grades, steady school attendance, and participating in family life and friendships outside of cyberspace.

Healthy teenagers don't usually get into trouble with the law or sneak out for secretive encounters with people they have met through Internet chats. They don't post inappropriate pictures of themselves online or lose sleep from spending hours glued to their computers.

Basically, it isn't a problem unless it's a problem.

Although there are many parent groups and health-care professionals lobbying to have gaming and Internet "addiction" recognized as a unique condition, it's important to realize that individuals can have many reasons for developing difficulties in this area.

In my experience, problem behaviours centred on the Internet, gaming and online gambling often arise out of a failure to find a coping strategy for underlying mental-health issues.

These issues include Asperger's syndrome (the problem Internet behaviour would be trying to find out everything about a topic by constantly researching it); pathological gambling (getting stuck on the casino sites); social anxiety disorder (chats, role-play gaming worlds); obsessive-compulsive disorder (obsessed with something that keeps them tied to the Internet); substance use disorders (ordering and researching ways to use drugs), and sexual "addiction" (seeking and downloading pornography).

Tumultuous events in a teen's life - loneliness, being bullied or parental divorce - can also be at the root of a problem.

In short, technology is not the sole issue - it's really how Internet use and online habits interact with a person's unique makeup that determine whether there are the seeds of a problem.

Dr. Bruce Ballon is the psychiatric consultant to youth addiction services and problem gambling services at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) in Toronto.