Internet Addiction – A Mental ‘Disorder’

Abstract

After the technological surge witnessed by the world in the last two decades, internet addiction is on the verge of becoming a major public health emergency. While the prevalence of internet addiction varies from 1·6% to 22·8%, a significant proportion of the rest of the population is shown to be susceptible to this form of addiction.Internet Addiction is known to have a detrimental effect on an individual's academic performance, peer interaction, familial relationships and psychological well-being. However, even then, internet addiction is not identified as a disorder as per the DSM V.Most of the studies done in this field have used abstract criteria to categorize people as internet addicts, along with the use of bias sampling methods. The lack of a gold-standard diagnostic criteria for evaluating the symptoms of internet addiction, makes the current data questionable and unreliable. As a result, no proper relationships have been able to be established with the various variables affecting internet addiction. Furthermore, due to lack of large-scale epidemiological studies, it has been difficult to determine the actual prevalence of internet addiction across the world.3,4