/ Cory Doctorow / 12:01 am Tue Jan 6, 2009

China treats "Internet Addicts" with boot-camp discipline and sex ed

Thomas sez, "China's People's Liberation Army has made Sex education part of the detox methods for getting people over Internet addiction. They claim it works, but one woman under their care has acquired 68 virtual husbands."
Here, in addition to military-style discipline, some 60-odd patients at his center undergo a three-month regimen of counseling, confidence-building activities, sex education, and in about 60 percent of the cases, medication. The treatment is designed to address underlying family and psychological problems, and boost their self-confidence.

There are a handful of young women here, going "cold turkey" from "Audition" and similar games, where players engage in dance battles, decorate virtual homes, and have virtual husbands and babies. (One female patient had amassed 68 "husbands," says Tao, with a sigh).

In an increasingly wired China, rehab for Internet addicts

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  1. “68 husbands”….

    Wow even in the virtual world she figure out what she wants…

    Is that art imitating life or what?

  4. I sense opportunity. Doubtless these people have yet to know the benefit of the sectioning of the frontal lobes via a slight implement inserted intra-ocular socket. Much profit to be made “helping”. Yesss….

  6. Besides playing laser tag and popping pink balloons, young people in Tao’s clinic are sometimes treated with mild electric shocks, according to this story in the W. Post, which also said that most of the patients have been forced to come here by their parents who pay upwards of $1300/mo, (10 times average Chinese salary) to have their kids de-addicted. National Geo photographer Fritz Hoffmann took this bizarre photo of Chinese patients being treated for Internet addiction by sitting under these “nanometer wave machines” :
    http://io9.com/388744/a-chinese-cure-for-internet-addiction

  7. And then, slowly, under close supervision, we will increasingly expose them to WoW.
    In due time, they will make excellent harvesters.

  8. Well it seems that not only Westerners get “pro-active” when there is a perceived (and in some cases real) problem with their kids.
    Is this not like the marijuana addiction treatment centers in the USA?

  9. Oh yeah I forgot…IMO sex ed is always good, not enough of it about in the USA, or China, I think.

  10. “Paramount Leader Hu Jintao, tear down this firewall!”

    Someday, People’s Republic of China, someday…

  11. Someone needs to make a MMO where you go through internet addiction detox as a plot point in the game.

  13. Well, re-education camps have always useful to China. It certainly got dissidents over their addiction to “democracy”.

  14. I thought it said:
    China treats “Internet Addicts” with boot-camp discipline sex ”

    Bah!

  15. http://www.google.com/search?q=unruly+teens+sent+to+camp

    Gets lots of hits, but I was actually looking for this article I remebered reading a few years back, basically a fee paying GitMo in Jamaica for rich US teens.

    Desperate US parents are sending their troublesome teenagers to tough boarding schools overseas, but many have had second thoughts when they discover just how tough these schools can be.


    Reporter Raphael Rowe visits Tranquility Bay in Jamaica, a correctional institution set up specifically to deal with unruly teens.

    http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/this_world/4061595.stm

  16. I sat in on a Chinese sex ed class once. It was a mandatory class that all couples in Nanjing were required to attend before getting married.

    There was a brief but dull lecture given by a family planning official about birth control where she showed off condoms and IUDs and birth control pills. And then there was a video. At the beginning the video looked very similar to the “how reproduction works” videos most American kids watch in sex ed classes around 6th grade (lots of illustrations of penises, vaginas, fallopian tubes, etc.). But then it morphed into more of a “what to do on your wedding night” video, complete with tips reminding husbands not to forgo foreplay, and quite graphic (not hard core, but still) blooper-like scenes of husbands being bad lovers and leaving their wives wanting. That video would probably be a huge hit on Youtube if we could get a copy.

    One interesting thing about the class was that it seemed to assume that the couples getting married had absolutely zero prior knowledge about sex. And judging by the attention paid by the attendees, it seemed this assumption was correct for about half of them. That half sat quietly, riveted to the TV. The other half of the attendees seemed pretty bored, though, playing with their mobile phones and taking naps like bored teenagers stuck in study hall.

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