WHEN I was 14, my parents used to yank away the cable from the computer so I couldn't log onto the Internet. That was after I broke the two-hour limit, what they had set for me so it wouldn't eat into my homework time.
I was so desperate that, during those times they left the house, I would secretly hunt for the cable in their room and get connected, even if it was just for a precious twenty minutes.
This memory came to mind when over the past week, I interviewed psychologists and found out that many youths here might be addicted to the Internet. They said there has been a great leap in the number of parents who drag their supposedly Internet-addicted kids to the psychologist, as compared to five or six years ago. Some psychologists said many more cases might have gone un-noticed.
During the course of my conversations, psychologists told of horror stories of their patients, problems left to fester for longer than they should bcause parents are generally more un-savvy when it comes to matters of the Internet. So they picked up on the problem slower.
There was this teen who was what his classmates would call a 'loser', the psychologist said. He was overweight, had acne, had no friends and was bullied. He was in a dysfunctional family where only the mother worked and his father always shot verbal abuse at him. His only escape? The Internet, of course. In the end, he dropped out of school and even stopped eating at times.
Then there was another ironic case of a mother who took his son to the psychologist for addiction to World of Warcraft (WoW), and got hooked herself when she joined WOW to get closer to her son, the psychologist laughingly recounted.
But what is the definition of Internet addiction? I could tell that some were still grappling with its definition, even as China became the first country to term Internet addiction as a clinical disorder.
Dr Fung of IMH warns against an over-reaction though. "If the kid can play game for 10 hours and still do his homework, can you call it a disorder? of course these are the people who don't need to sleep, lah,"he quipped.
But now I understand why my parents had to keep me away, I was starting to fall into "the trap of the web", as Dr Winslow of the National University Hospital would say.
As another psychologist put it, get back into the real life, man.