China treating Internet addiction ‘disorder’ at militant style facilities

By David Ly

It’s been highly debated in the psychological associations, but Internet addiction disorder (IAD) isn’t officially classified as a mental disorder (seriously. Wiki it.). Though one can be addicted to computer gaming, cyber relationships, and sex, and other net-related compulsions, IAD is uncertain — possibly just a term or category of disorders. So, how can someone — let alone a nation — treat such a disputed disorder with one concrete method?

Earlier this year, a Youtube video called “China’s Web Junkies” was released about people apparently afflicted with such a disorder. One word comes to mind upon viewing: disturbing. Addictions are harmful and should be treated with supported networks — not in environments where you’re heckled by an officer-like facilitator who wakes you up before the sun rises in a dingy bunk by shining a red laser into your eyes.

Some of the boys in the video are shown in tears, traumatized –— one even having been drugged by his own parents and taken to the facility. It’s ridiculous: this country uses a borderline abusive method that tears down emotions to treat a disorder that isn’t even professionally defined yet.

At facilities like the one in a suburb of Beijing, the attire is head-to-toe in camo as if preparing for routine militant training: walking in straight lines with synchronized steps through locked cell doors.

Facilities to treat individuals with harmful disorders are essential to the safety of patients and those close to them. But, honestly, when it’s an extreme and disturbing method to cure someone of a disorder that isn’t even established, the entire thing is ridiculous.

Eating? Bullshit.

By Joel MacKenzie

I am so done with eating.

I can’t count how many times in the day I wish I wasn’t hungry so I could keep doing whatever I was doing.

I wasn’t always like this. Years ago, I remember explicitly thinking that someone who considers eating a chore (Anderson Cooper) was insane. Eating was the best. Eating was magic. Everything else sucked because it stopped me from eating, from feeling completely chalked-full of energy, from fulfilling one of the most basic drives in life, to attain energy, to live, to thrive.

But I fought that desire. I wanted to know that there was more to life than being full. Outside of school, I found passions: I filled my mornings with exercising, but that only lasted an hour, tops. I took up Chinese, writing, and music.

And now I’d be completely content being fed by IV lines so I could keep working all day. There’s more to life, and I’m gonna find it.