Can you really be addicted to the internet?

Chinese scientists have observed differences in the brains of people who obsessively use the internet similar to those found in people who have substance addictions. Is this proof that the internet can be addictive? Polly Curtis, with your help, finds out. Get in touch below the line, email your views to 
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/reality-check-with-polly-curtis/2012/jan/12/internet-health

Some extracts:
Colin Drummond, professor of addiction psychiatry at Kings College London, which has the largest research centre for psychiatry in Europe, on the Today programme this morning. You can listen to him here and he's just expanded his argument in a phone interview with me. I asked him whether internet addiction is a medical illness. He said:

No. It's interesting that people who use the internet excessively seem to have different brain structures compared with people who don't but the big issue is whether we are looking at cause or effect. There is quite good evidence that people who engage in substance misuse and addictions and to some extent gambling do have problems with impulse control which fits with abnormalities in the frontal lobes of the brain similar to those in this study. But it is a big leap to go from there to suggest that the internet is re-wiring your brain.

If people have emotional problems and that leads them to use the internet obsessively then they obviously need help to deal with those problems, but that's quite different to saying that the internet is addictive. Perhaps unhappy people or people with impulse control problems may well need some help. I'm not denying it' a problem for individuals, but trying to classify it as an addiction has risks attached to it. They are treating an addiction rather than emotional problems that might lead to the emotional behaviour. Excessively internet use is a symptom not a cause of a person's problems.
   
But others within the psychiatric community do believe it's a real disorder. The Independent's story reports:

Henrietta Bowden Jones, consultant psychiatrist at Imperial College, London, who runs Britain's only NHS clinic for internet addicts and problem gamblers, said: "The majority of people we see with serious internet addiction are gamers ? people who spend long hours in roles in various games that cause them to disregard their obligations. I have seen people who stopped attending university lectures, failed their degrees or their marriages broke down because they were unable to emotionally connect with anything outside the game."