Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2001/02/11
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Luggers beware, the following report came up on Yahoo Italy today. I feel it's my duty to warn you of the dangers of this innocent-seeming passtime: Depression, nervousness, eyestrain and doubts about their own sexuality: internet surfers are reporting the same symptoms throughout the country. Specialists in net-addiction, however, cannot agree on therapeutic measures. A recent case of addiction to the internet, a 39 year old Neapolitan estate agent, was presented by Roberto Rinaldi, a Reich Institute psychotherapist, at the "net-addiction" conference currently being held in Naples. "In this case, excessive exposure to the internet led the patient to question his own sexuality. After participating in lengthy chat sessions, the patient noted that if he presented himself as a straight male, the response rate was low, whereas if he pretended to be gay, social success was assured. This shocked him and he came to me to ask whether this confirmed that he was, in fact, gay." Doctor Sorrentino, on the other hand, recounts the following case history: "A Neapolitan journalist came to me, evidently very worried and preoccupied. He felt that he was losing his reason because his computer refused to connect to the internet. Therapy? It's early days yet, I think we need professional training to handle these new pathologies." Roberto Rinaldi recounts the case of a young girl who came to him a few months back: "She was going through a crisis because her boyfriend, after an uninterrupted two day chat session, was terrified by the thought of any form of physical contact with her." Renata Taddei told us of two cases of her experience at Rome: the first, an engineer who had lost all contact with reality due to a surfeit of email, a case which she cured by putting him in touch with his wife through their inboxes. "In this way his wife was able to convince him to take the plunge back into the everyday world again". But the second case is a classic case of partners in crisis thanks to the internet: "she discovered that he was betraying her with another woman in sex websites." Tally ho! Rob. Images of India at http://www.robertappleby.com