China Bans Shock Treatment For Internet Addiction 113
angry tapir writes "China has banned the use of shock therapy to treat Internet addiction after its use at one hospital sparked nationwide controversy. The hospital drew wide media coverage in recent months after Internet users claiming to have received the treatment wrote in blogs and forums about being tied down and subjected to shocks for 30 minutes at a time."
Damn it (Score:5, Funny)
Nothing gave me more pleasure that thinking of WOW power levelers with electrodes attached to various body parts.
Re:Damn it (Score:5, Funny)
Really? You are weird.
Typo? (Score:1, Funny)
No, I'm wired.
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This is Slashdot after all.
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So is there a list of "illnesses" that they do still treat with electrical shocks or is it okay for pretty much everything except internet addiction?
To quote the bottom of slashdot:
Of course there's no reason for it, it's just our policy.
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You might be surprised. Shock therapy is still used in the US - I have a close family member for whom it was recommended and he volunteered. Of course, I'm not sure that we'd apply it without the patient's permission. But, although I'm not an expert (haven't even googled it since quite a few years ago when my family member was getting zapped), is somebody who volunteers for shock therapy necessarily qualified to make that decision for themselves?
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Many states have laws that allow police or other such officials to drop off someone showing signs of insanity to a psychiatric facility. In California, this is referred to as a 5150 after the section of the penal code containing it. They can make the assertation that this needs to be done off of second hand reports, not first hand observation. Once the person is committed, he can be deemed to not be sane enough himself to make decisions regarding his own need for treatment and be subjected to electric sh
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Chinese "Nationwide Controversy?" (Score:1, Flamebait)
Does China even have such a thing as "nationwide controvery"? Or is the "nation" here the United States? Or maybe Canada?
Re:Chinese "Nationwide Controversy?" (Score:5, Funny)
Does China even have such a thing as "nationwide controvery"?
Yes.
Or is the "nation" here the United States? Or maybe Canada?
No. It means China. You ought to get out more - there's a whole world out here. We have controversies and everything.
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Re:Chinese "Nationwide Controversy?" (Score:5, Informative)
I'll chalk this one up to western ignorance over how much the Chinese public actually knows, not blatant bias.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal#Chinese_public [wikipedia.org]
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Doesn't hurt them? (Score:2)
"Some Chinese medical experts still believe shock treatment for Internet addiction does not harm children, but the majority disavow it, said Tao Ran, the founder of a Beijing treatment center Web-addicted teens, during a recent interview."
Sure, as long as you're only worried about their physical health, I'm sure it doesn't... Too bad it scars them for life mentally.
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First and foremost, there's two kinds of electro-shock therapy. One is simple aversion therapy, putting the person in front of the computer and when they try to open the browser a painful shock is given. That doesn't sound like what they are trying to accomplish here so I'll assume that it is the second kind, the kind which actually tries to change the way a person thinks and feels about memories.
Done correctly there's nothing inherently wrong with that kind of shock therapy, it's even made something of a
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Tricking your child into going to a 'hospital' where they tie the child down and shock them for 30 minutes at a time... There's no way that doesn't leave mental scars.
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Why would you need to trick the child to go anywhere? Just give him/her two nails and leave alone in a room with a 220V outlet.
Re:Doesn't hurt them? It is disappointing (Score:1)
That parents have to deceive their kids. Then, it's a social ill that some of these games actually replace other outlets.
I first read about this last week, on the 9th (no, i never bothered submitting, because nothing i ever suggested for submission gets posted by /.)
http://www.itworld.com/internet/70777/chinese-web-addicts-get-boot-camp-therapy [itworld.com]
Personally, though, i think some form of boot camp needs to be here in the US, but not just for gaming. LOTS of anti-social behaviors could be addressed. At least for
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Yeah, let's treat their desire for fictional war games by teaching them how to fight for real. And let's help their social skills, by making them not talk while someone yells in their face.
Playing a game isn't anti-social, btw, you presumably mean "unsociable", and I hope you include "watching TV", "reading a book" and "sitting at home quietly with a cup of tea" as similar "unsociable" activities. OTOH, teenagers who go out to the pub every night are doing fine...
For actual anti-social behaviours, I believe
Re:Doesn't hurt them? (Score:5, Informative)
The most prevalent "shock therapy" currently in use in the US is electro-convulsive therapy (ECT). It is used to treat major depression that is not responsive to drugs. It has nothing to do with retrieving or "erasing" memories, only with zapping the brain in hopes that neurochemical imbalances will be alleviated during its recovery from the trauma (shock), and hopefully for some time after.
Re:Doesn't hurt them? (Score:4, Insightful)
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What is your alternative to treating such a severe depression that we have no other means for? Just do nothing and let them kill themselves? Lobotomy? Euthanize them?
Depression ranks as one of the most horrific ailment I can think of. Even if there is some small chance to help those patients, then we should do all we can. It might be crude, it probably does quite a bit of damage that will affect quality of life later, but it is a hell of a lot better than the alternative. I know that if I had a condition li
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babyduckhat didn't say that it was wrong to use the tool if it works, just that it was equivalent to bashing things with rocks. It shouldn't be news that bashing things with rocks works. I've bashed things with rocks as an alternative to a hammer when none was available and I needed to hammer a nail, or break things open that I might have otherwise sawed open etc. My sister once used a rock as an alternative to her car keys. It's not the ideal way to get the car door open, but it works. You just have to rep
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>>The idea is that you shock the brain while it is remembering the dramatic memory, cuasing the brain to either fail to store the >>memory or to store the memory without the emotional content.
What a load of crap. This is not how it's done. ECT (electro-convulsive therapy) is done while the patient is asleep. Nothing to do with shocking the brain during specific memories.
As an aside, amnesia is a common side effect of ECT. I should know, I've lost 9 months of memories from a few years back du
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http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2009-07/14/content_8426874.htm [chinadaily.com.cn]
According to the Guangdong-based Information Times, shocks were given if patients broke any of the center's 86 rules, which included prohibitions on eating chocolate, locking the bathroom door, taking pills before a meal, and sitting in Dr. Yang's chair without permission.
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Electro Convulsive Therapy relies on inducing a siezure via small electric currents through the brain. There is no benefit to shocking someone for 30 minutes: the seizure can be induced in seconds. Furthermore, the patient does not need to be awake (and indeed it is better not to be awake, as anasthetic and paralytic drugs will take care of the unpleasant effects of the seizure).
So either China's psychiatry is in the dark ages, "shock therapy" is misinterpreted, or the bloggers are full of
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I wouldn't say there's nothing wrong with it. It's effects are fully identical to a closed skull head trauma (literally, it's just like being knocked unconscious with a bat). As a very last resort in sufficiently serious cases it might be better than no treatment at allbut I wouldn't say there's nothing wrong with it.
pic (Score:4, Insightful)
Honestly, this seems like another human rights abuse... people should have the right to choose if they want to go through shock therapy!
but did we really require the big pic there?
Re:pic (Score:5, Funny)
Honestly, this seems like another human rights abuse... people should have the right to choose if they want to go through shock therapy!
The right to an informed choice. But can someone in the throes of internet addiction really be said to be making a choice? This is why we keep shocking 'em until they consent to it. That's the begining of the path to recovery.
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well, they are more likely to have done extensive research on their own about it...
Re:pic (Score:4, Insightful)
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people should have the right to choose if they want to go through shock therapy!
Yes, just like you get to choose the duration of your sentence, your cell mate, and the color of your cell when you commit a crime in your country. /sarcasm
I'm not defending China for this (they themselves seem to be upset at the practice), but laws are different everywhere and if you commit a "crime", you have to pay the price, be it getting your ass caned, shocked or in the case of t
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I wish I could find these a
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Reminds me of the scene from Ghostbusters.... (Score:2)
He tests some poor schmoe who gets close to half of them right, but he gets shocked on every card anyway.
Then he tests a potential future girlfriend and never shocks her at all, even though she misses every card.
Shock therapy as a
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if only the shocks being talked about in this story were so mild, and so harmlessly administered.
Re:Reminds me of the scene from Ghostbusters.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Everyone brings up that scene as if Vaikman was messing up his experiment just to flirt with the chick, but that ignores his true brilliance. Sure, he fudges the test for her -- she clearly is not psychic, she's just there as a control, so it really doesn't matter if she ever gets shocked or not. It isn't like he's testing electrocution of normal folks. But as for the guy, how is seemingly shocked for giving the right answers -- that's the whole experiment. Vaikman even says so: "I'm studying the effects of negative reinforcement on ESP ability." In other words, will you keep being psychic even if you get electrocuted for it.
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She's the control?!?
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But as for the guy, how is seemingly shocked for giving the right answers -- that's the whole experiment. Vaikman even says so: "I'm studying the effects of negative reinforcement on ESP ability." In other words, will you keep being psychic even if you get electrocuted for it.
Technically, he's studying the effect of
punishment on ESP ability. Punishment and negative reinforcement are two different things.
But anyway, I still look at it differently. I think the test of ESP is not "can you percieve what is on the card" but rather, "can you percieve that the experimentor is fucking with you?"
In which case, I'd posit that he passed.
Oh, I get it "sparked controversy" (Score:4, Insightful)
In other news... "Internet addicts treated with electricity". The real story here is that this is there to be banned in the first place.
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well your obviously addicted to the internet. If you access Google USA. because everything you need is on Google China.
Re:Oh, I get it "sparked controversy" (Score:4, Funny)
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or that they went BACK ONTO THE INTERNET to post about it...did it even work?
suspicious (Score:1, Interesting)
Is this to cure internet addiction or a reason to punish those that bypassed chinas censorship... hmmmm
Before anyone asks about Western shock therapy... (Score:2, Insightful)
When electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is used in psychiatric settings here in the West, patients are completely unconscious and pumped full of muscle relaxants to keep them from jumping all over the table. Since they're unconscious, they feel no pain.. completely different from what the Chinese seem to be doing, which seeks to use electric shock as painful punishment for too much WOW.
Needless to say, I didn't RTFA.
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I have a friend who went through ECT for severe depression. Given she was sectioned into a psychiatric hospital by her parents without consent, I'd be hard pressed to say her ECT was with informed consent, or even if it was overall a positive force in her life, the side effects have been pretty traumatic for her. Not to mention the effect it had on her realitionship with her family.
She was over 21 when she was committed, with a university degree and had been holding down a job as webmaster for a Teir 1 bank
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More like Ineffective (Score:2, Insightful)
The hospital drew wide media coverage in recent months after Internet users claiming to have received the treatment wrote in blogs and forums
So the internet addicted patients used the internet to complain about the problems with the internet addiction treatment?
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Quacks (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Quacks (Score:4, Interesting)
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There are multiple types of electroshock therapy. electro-convulsive is only one type. Another type called vagus nerve stimulation (which uses an implanted device similar to a pacemaker) is used to treat certain types of epilepsy, as well as treatment-resistant depression.
don't believe it (Score:2)
I don't believe the story. Sounds too silly and arbitrary
Stephan
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Typo or no typo, edit button or no edit button; if it goes on in the US, the story can certainly also be made up in the US.
Stephan
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I'm not questioning what happens in the US. I'm questioning the story about "China's internet addicts".
In fact, I have heared of such programs carried out by medical doctors (as you linked to http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2007/08/school-shock [motherjones.com]), but curiously only in connection with the USA. Do you have references for other countries?
Stephan
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Yes ok, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Association_of_Specialty_Programs_and_Schools [wikipedia.org] says,
Do you have references for other countries that are not connected to the USA?
Stephan
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To rephrase Spinaltap... (Score:2)
This seems like a great way to create psychological maladjustment.
Presuming, of course, you do not already consider "internet addiction" to be maladjustment.
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This could be what we've all been waiting for.
Definition of "internet addiction" (Score:1)
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Most likely. On a similar note, it's interesting how in 50+ years of television, there is virtually no concept of television addiction (compare Television Addiction [wikipedia.org] to Internet Addiction [wikipedia.org] on Wikipedia).
I disagree. Until the Internet became popular, "concerned groups" were always banging on about children getting "square eyes" from watching too much TV, and still there is the meme of the "couch potato", watching TV all the time and becoming a fat, lazy slob; a drain on society. Note how someone who sits reading books is not stereotyped in this way.
I'm not surprised that Wikipedia has more material about "Internet Addiction"; after all it is a website, maintained by people with a keen interest in such matt
If they wanted REAL shock therapy (Score:2, Insightful)
Why didn't they just randomly replace images requested by the "addict"'s computer with goatse?
That's a shock therapy that would actually work.
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Alternative treatments (Score:1)
Shocked! (Score:2)
after Internet users claiming to have received the treatment wrote in blogs and forums about being tied down and subjected to shocks for 30 minutes at a time
Wow. There's a shock. Not only was it unethical; it was also ineffective.
The truth is... (Score:1)
No alternative medicines ? (Score:1)
Not unexpected... (Score:1)
Obviously it didn't work (Score:2)
...after Internet users claiming to have received the treatment wrote in blogs and forums about being tied down and subjected to shocks for 30 minutes at a time."
They received electric shocks for Internet addiction, and then rushed right out to blog about it?
I'd say that's a pretty good indication that their condition is hopeless.....
Banned only in some cases? (Score:2)
World of Warcraft addiction is now no longer treated with shock therapy. More severe cases of internet abuse, such as an addiction to writing overly uppity blog entries, on the other hand...
suppose they'll have to resort to other methods (Score:1)
In other news Hospital in Shandong ceases shock treatments for Internet Addiction, due to ban, starts performing full frontal Lobotomies [wikipedia.org] instead, claims the procedure is 98% effective at quashing internet addictions.
Still legel to Electro 6 year olds in the US (Score:1)
Not very effective... (Score:1)
Doesn't seem to have been an effective treatment then, does it =P
Get the Facts about ECT (Score:1)