The American Journal of Psychiatry has officially declared [courtesy of a Wired.com article] that “Internet addiction appears to be a common disorder that merits inclusion in DSM-V [Diagnotic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders]”.  Yup, that’s right.  If you get angry because you missed that raid on Onyxia’s Lair, then you could very well be mentally disturbed.

The biggest problem I see with such a claim is that the basis for most of their research is from people who spend more than 23 hours a week on the computer.  23 hours?  That’s it?  This figure would include nearly anyone who works for a business that is any kind of computer-dependent (and that includes most of them if only through internal emails and the internet).  It’s one thing to use a computer 23 hours in a week; it’s another thing entirely to spend 23 hours in a day playing video games (which is the root of much of this kind of research).

It just seems like yet another blow to geekdom for people to be able to say, “well you have a disorder because you like your computer too much.”