China has 400 internet addiction treatment centres. It was the first country to declare internet addiction a clinical disorder, labelling it the number one public health threat to its teenage population.
In his terrifying book Irresistible, Adam Alter describes how some of the teenage addicts’ parents were interviewed for a recent documentary, “Web Junkie”. The parents wept as they told the filmmakers how they had had to shut up their progeny in the centres, where the youngsters were forced on to a regimen of pills and military marches: how else could they save their zombie-like children?
