Technology | 2010.02.10
A healthy addiction | John Crace
A fixation with Facebook is a far cry from the sort of depression that put me into hospital
The world through a keyboard. The universe possibly. The relief effort in Haiti. Pictures from Hubble. Shakespeare\'s sonnets. A share price from Hong Kong. Anything you want in your own home. The internet offers it in milli-seconds. More than we can absorb, more than we can understand, and always the potential to add more. More, more.
It\'s the stuff of Renaissance dreams, the stuff that\'s meant to make us happy. And yet for some, the internet has become a final circle of hell. Palms sweating, eyes swirling, you know you\'re wasting your time, your life. But you can\'t stop.
Leeds University scientists have just completed a study, reported in the journal Psychopathology, that has uncovered a link between internet addiction and depression . This won\'t come as total surprise. The clue was possibly in the word addiction. Anyone who is addicted to anything is more likely to be depressed. It\'s called mental illness.
No one has worked out the causation. Are depressed people more likely to waste hours in front of a computer, or will staring at a screen for most of your waking life leave you questioning existential futility? It does matter. Here\'s the problem. There\'s depression and depression, and it\'s never clear just what anyone is talking about. At one end there\'s total darkness, blankness, nothingness; at the other, feeling a bit fed up.
So let\'s start at the lighter end. How long do you think a normal person could spend surfing the net before starting to feel really depressed? The Leeds researchers identified social networking, porn and gambling sites as the natural habitat of depressed addicts. No surprise there. Talking online to people you don\'t really know, sweaty silicon faking orgasm, and losing money you can\'t afford to lose. All in perpetuity. What\'s not to get depressed about?
The thing is any website will make you depressed if you spend enough time looking at it. Even the Guardian\'s, though perhaps I shouldn\'t be pointing that out. Imagine you are forced to watch a site devoted to positive thinking. Hour after hour of Paul McKenna bullying you into thinking yourself happy. How long could you last before you felt like killing yourself? Or him?
More interesting research might have been to identify which sites make you depressed the quickest. Could 10 minutes of Facebook or porn make you feel quite happy? It\'s minute 11 and thereafter you have to watch out for. And I can easily imagine feeling ecstatic if I was a couple of grand to the good after a quarter of an hour on a poker site.
Or is even 10 minutes of happiness too much to ask for? Just a few minutes of the relentlessly upbeat Tottenham Hotspur website – to which I am compulsively drawn two or three times a day – is usually more than enough for me to reach for the plastic cutlery. Here\'s Harry Redknapp "gutted to concede another goal in injury though overall the boys played well". Really? Yet I keep coming back, for odd moments of undiluted joy. Like Monday\'s announcement that Robbie Keane was off to Celtic.
It is of course possible that I go back because I am an addict. It wouldn\'t be the first time. Then neither would it be a surprise if I were to go back because I am clinically depressed. It\'s a condition I\'ve suffered from for years. So maybe I\'m nailed either way. But there is still a qualitative distinction to be made.
Having done time in hospital with depression, I can\'t help feeling that anyone with the energy to switch on a computer and even care what\'s happening on Facebook is showing a level of engagement with the world well beyond the catatonic. So it may not be quite as healthy as actually chatting to someone, but it\'s a vast improvement on staring at the wall. My shrink would certainly have taken it as a positive sign.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]al-health-depression-in-adults
