CHINA TO END WEB ADDICT SHOCK THERAPY

At the Addiction Treatment Centre in eastern China, more than 6,000 internet addicts — most of them teenagers — not only had their web access taken away, they were also treated with electroshock therapy. The centre, in Shandong province, made headlines in September after one of its patients killed her mother in retribution for abuse she had purportedly suffered at the camp during a forced detox regimen.

Now China is trying to regulate camps like the one in Shandong, which have become a last resort for parents exasperated by their child’s habit of playing online games for hours on end.

The government has drafted a law that would crack down on the camps’ worst excesses, including electroshock. Medical specialists welcomed the law, announced this week in China’s state-controlled news media, as an initial step toward curbing scandals in the industry.

“It’s a very important move for protecting young children,” said Tao Ran, the director of the Internet Addiction Clinic at Beijing Military General Hospital.

Mr Tao said that many Chinese parents believe that the effects of electroshock therapy are fleeting. But he had seen several Chinese teenagers return from boot camps that treat internet addiction showing signs of lasting psychological trauma, he said.

Qu Xinjiu, a law professor at China University of Political Science and Law in Beijing, said the belief that parents have supreme jurisdiction over their children, and that even police officers have no right to intervene in family affairs, is widespread in China.

“That’s why there are so many parents sending their kids for electroshock therapy, even when outsiders think it’s wrong to do so,” Mr Qu said.

Figures on the number or growth of internet detox camps in China are scarce, but the camps’ methods have been generating concern for years.

The legislation would also limit how much time each day that minors could play online games at home or in internet bars. Providers of the games would be obliged to take measures to monitor and restrict use, such as requiring players to register under their real names.

The law does not yet specify the number of hours allowed, but minors would be prohibited from playing online games anywhere between midnight and 8am.

Mr Tao said he doubted that the draft law, which was introduced by the State Council, China’s Cabinet, could be enforced evenly nationwide. Provisions to limit the number of hours spent online probably could be easily flouted, he said.

Reports in the Chinese news media this week said that lawmakers would accept public comments on the draft law through early February but gave no indication of when it might be put into practice.

In 2009, the Chinese Health Ministry issued guidelines against using electroshock therapy for internet addicts. Trent M Bax, the author of Youth and Internet Addiction in China, said that he wondered whether a ban would be any more effective.

Despite the Health Ministry’s policy, “punitive practices continue to victimise China’s youth” in internet detox camps, said Mr Bax, an assistant professor of sociology at Ewha Womans University in Seoul, South Korea.

Recent scientific evidence indicates that the best treatments for digital addiction appear to be cognitive behavioural therapy in individual and group settings, which often include patients’ parents and significant others, said Daria J Kuss, a specialist on internet and game addiction at Nottingham Trent University in Britain.

Ms Kuss said that medication can also be effective, especially if internet addiction is accompanied by anxiety or mood disorders, such as depression. But, she said, beatings and electroshock therapy “are not commonly used in the treatment of internet and gaming addiction and are to be considered unethical and inhumane.”

Officials and psychologists around the world have debated how to measure and regulate extreme internet use. A crucial question, analysts say, is whether to classify the problem as a psychological disorder or as a symptom of underlying disorders.

In a sign of how fluid the debate is in China, the Health Ministry said in 2009 that it would no longer use the term “addiction” to describe how the internet harmed people who used it improperly or excessively.

But a study the same year by the China Youth Association for Network Development, which is led by a committee under the ruling Communist Party, found that more than 24 million Chinese, ages 13 to 29, who used the internet were digital addicts.