Tell me your IP address, and I will tell who you are. Issues of diagnosis of Internet addiction: illness, disorder, or fiction?

Abstract

This article is devoted to the analysis of the current state of the problem of Internet addiction, which includes the following issues: the boundaries of diagnosis, diagnostic criteria, clinical manifestations, epidemiology data, neurobiological studies, comorbidity, existing approaches to therapy. In the past of two decades, there was an increase in publications devoted to the phenomenon of Internet addiction. Despite the existing disagreements in the professional environment about the validity of the very concept of «Internet addiction», every year there was several studies in the field of neurobiology, psychology, clinical psychiatry, proving that Internet addiction is a particular variant of behavioral addictive disorders. In the recent years, Internet addiction has gained special significance in a number of Asian countries (China, South Korea), where this type of pathology is becoming a national problem among young people.