Recently I have become quite interested in the emphasis on the internet that now seems to play a key role, not just in my life, but in the lives of many of my peers. As a result, I started looking in my local libraries for any books that were published that had any relevant information on the actual effect of the internet on the psyche. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any information there, so instead, I used the internet itself. After just a few minutes (compared to the 4 hours I spent in libraries) I found a piece of research by Dr Catriona Morrison of Leeds University and the results were as follows;
"Excessive internet use is linked to depression"
"In the Leeds study, young people were more likely to be internet addicted than middle-aged users, with the average age of the addicted group standing at 21 years."
"The internet use and depression levels of 1,319 people aged 16-51 were evaluated for the study, and of these, 1.2% were classed as being internet addicted."
This has interested me, and I will now look further into the matter, and hopefully follow up this post with more information, as I would like to know what constitutes addiction in the case of internet, and if the participants were chosen randomly, were volunteers or if they were a stratified sample (as the findings are compared to the country's gambling addiction rate; "While small, this figure is larger than the incidence of gambling in the UK, which stands at 0.6%.")
