The potential for some users to go overboard when it comes to being online has been obvious since the days when being online meant dialing in to a BBS. In more recent years, however, widespread 'Net access has allowed psychologists to document this obsession on a population level and begin to characterize Internet addiction as a distinct set of behaviors, and relate them to other forms of addiction. A recently published survey of Chinese adolescents from Guangzhou has found that signs of Internet addiction strongly correlate with various forms of self-injury, a finding that may place the addiction squarely within the spectrum of impulse control disorders.
The survey involved over 1,600 high school students, aged 13-18 years; the questions covered demographic information, additional influences on mental health, and two sets of queries on Internet addiction and self-injurious behavior. The Internet addiction series came from a formal Internet Addiction Test that has been validated in the literature. Questions on self-harm covered various forms of self-inflicted injury, from pulling hair to hitting or burning. The survey achieved a staggering 99 percent response rate.
In terms of Internet addiction scores, only 10 members of the survey population wound up in the "severe" category, which would have made statistically significant results difficult to achieve. As a result, the authors lumped them in with the moderately addicted, which constituted just over 10 percent of the survey population. That's a bit higher than the rates seen in many European countries, but in keeping with other surveys of Asian populations.
Frequent self-injurious behavior was categorized as an average of one instance a month for the past six months; approximately 4.5 percent of the subjects fell into that category. This, again, was in keeping with the numbers obtained from previous surveys in China, and was also similar to numbers obtained in European populations. Another 10 percent had at least one instance of self-injury in the past six months. Three quarters of these instances of self-harm involved hitting, pulling hair, pinching, or banging of the individual's head.
Based on a simple, bivariate analysis, the correlation between Internet addiction and self-injury was very high; Internet addicts were about 2.5 times more likely to have engaged in at least some form of self injury in the past six months. When it comes to frequent self-injury, the number rose to nearly double that rate.
A quick look at potentially confounding factors, however, revealed a huge laundry list of factors that were also associated with self-injury: "age, city or rural schools, family residential locations, sleep hours, drinking, involvement in physical activity, perception on study burden, disruption to daily life or study, family dissatisfaction, and recent stressful life events as well as depression." The authors responded by performing multivariate analysis, and still found an association between high levels of self-injury and Internet addiction, with the odds of addicts engaging in harmful activities doubling.
As the authors point out, there are a few limitations to their study, such as its reliance on self-reporting and the lack of any longitudinal data that might allow causal connections to be made. As they put it, their work "can be considered as an exploratory study to identify the potential relationship between internet addiction and self-injurious behaviour among adolescents."
Still, the results suggest a fair correlation between Internet addiction and self-injury. The significance of this result is that self-injury, like drug and alcohol addiction, is considered an impulse control disorder. As such, the results appear to indicate that Internet addiction may overlap with more traditional forms of addiction, and thus may be subject to similar therapeutic approaches.