Teens In China Are Now Going To Rehab For The Most Insane Thing Imaginable
It's a new and extremely serious problem.
China has a big problem.
Out of any country, China has the most Internet users, at around 700 million. It's estimated that 10% of the youth population—or 24 million kids—are addicted to online gaming. Chinese youth addicted to games like "World of Warcraft" will play 8, 10 or even upwards of 20 hours a day. In some cases, the addictions are so severe than teens are wearing diapers as they play, just so they won't have to get up from their computers to use the bathroom.
In January 2015, a man in Taiwan died after a three-day gaming binge and no one in the Internet cafe seemed to notice. In 2010, a South Korean couple's three-month-old baby starved to death while they left her alone and gamed for most of the day. Internet addiction is a plague in southeast Asia, and China is starting to do something about it.
In 2011, there were over 144,000 registered Internet cafes in China.
This number has likely grown significantly in recent years. The Internet is now widely accessible in China, and for cheap. People all over the country, and particularly teens, have taken advantage of cheap rates and the proliferation of Internet cafes to play games for hours a day. As a result, "China has become one of the first countries in the world to recognise internet addiction officially as a clinical condition."
To combat the problem, China is turning to extreme measures.
Parents of online game-addicted teens have been enrolling their kids in "'military-style' detox camps." Camps like China's Youth Rehabilitation Base and hundreds of others have popped up around China to get teens clean of their digital dependencies.
The programs are essentially run like army bootcamps.
The kids must line up for roll call, sleep in a barracks, march and stand still for 20 minutes a day to "reform their posture." The programs last about six months and end up costing the parents about $1,500.
This particular camp is covered extensively in a documentary by RT, and it's available on YouTube. The documentary explores the more deeply rooted causes of digital addiction and the need to escape, from problems at home to self-esteem issues.
Tao Ran runs the camp from the documentary.
According to Ran, he fulfills the roles of a "prison warden," a "kindergarten head" and a "psychiatrist." He essentially sees the detox camps as the only way to reform the troubled teens' bodies and minds.
The camps are not without controversy and a significant dark side—recently, a 15-year-old was beaten to death at a similar detox facility by his own trainers.
This teen is being prepared for electroencephalogram scans, which measure and analyze brain activity at the Internet Addiction Treatment Center.
The problem of online addiction runs deep throughout the newly emerging digital world, and is by no means a problem China faces on its own. The detox camps are still in their infancy in China and are not regulated well yet and employ "crude military-style discipline."
The Western world will probably be seeing similar detox clinics before too long—digital addiction is affecting the whole world, and other nations will have to find a way to respond before the addiction destroys too many more lives.