or not.

[lotesse]

MSNBC recreates the same tiresome linkage of internet use and depression. I hate the way this gets talked about - I had so many struggles with my mother, as a kid, over my internet use. I was a lonely socially-isolated kid in the middle of nowhere, and yeah, slash fandom felt like a better place to be than all the high school social events.

There's something profoundly irritating in being treated as if, by simply being a depressive, you've lost the capacity to make choices and fulfill your own needs. If I'm having a depressed day, I can decide how I want to handle it. I can examine myself and make the call as to whether I need to be firm and get myself out into the world, or if I just really need a day to puddle and nest and re-center and recover. Because of the social and time/space structures online, it's pretty much always going to feel safer and easier to me than face-to-face interaction. That doesn't mean that the internet is hurting me!

Comments

[schemingreader]

From the second paragraph of the article: "But it is not clear whether the Internet causes depression or whether depressed people are drawn to it."

You could substitute a lot of other words for "internet."

[lotesse]

Yeah, but the emphasis in the whole piece is off. It amkes me miffy; they put in a few clauses about how the internet might not be causing depression, but then they spent the rest of the time talking about it in terms of addiction.

[schemingreader]

You don't live at home anymore, so what your mom thinks is only as interesting as you allow it to be.

(I need to have that tattooed somewhere.)

[lotesse]

*enormous grin*

Via the network

[rydra_wong]

I was interested to find out from the Guardian article that the group of "Internet addicts" who showed higher levels of depression in fact consisted of only eighteen people.

This is not a great statistical basis for claiming evidence of anything, IMHO.

But at least the authors seem to be admitting that they don't know which way the correlation runs, if there is one. To me it seems bleeding obvious that some of us use the internet a lot because we are dealing with mental (or physical) disabilities that make doing other stuff a lot more challenging.

(Actually, I bet if you did another study of people who use the internet "excessively", you'd find higher than average levels of physical disabilities, too. Clearly the Intrawebs are causing it!)

[ineptshieldmaid]

Aaaaargh yes. The dangers of the internet! A terrible, scary place where I got to meet other writers, fantasy geeks, people my age, people older than me, people younger than me, people who give me sensible advice, people who need MY sensible advice... STARTS TO SOUND LIKE THE REAL WORLD, DOESN'T IT?

[slashfairy]

shit.

when i was a kid i lived in the library. i lived in the school library every spare minute of the day (i had my own pass- recess, lunch, any time i finished my work early). i lived in the old Carnegie library in santa monica down in the children's section on Saturday (i had my own pair of white cotton gloves for handling the really old books), and in the library of Friends' Meeting on Sunday.

and thank GOD i did- i learned a lot about myself and about dealing with the ever so awkward world.

i saw my first psychiatrist when i was nine, but it sure wasn't because i could read.

[aiffe]

Hear hear!

I tend to think, "If it wasn't internet, it'd be something else." I have an obsessive personality. I didn't have internet access until my mid to late teens, and didn't actually have it at home until I was in my twenties. I found things to obsess over, to escape reality. I need to escape reality. I can't just go cold turkey off my coping mechanisms and magically be normal.

The internet did not make me depressed. Life made me depressed, man. The internet helps sometimes.