Computer “addiction

See L. Slater, Kafka s Boys A Story of Sex and Serotonin, in C. Elliott and T. Chambers, eds., Prozac as a Way of Life (Chapel Hill, N.C. University of North Carolina Press, 2004) H. Shaffer, M. Hall, and J. Vander Bilt, Computer Addiction A Critical Consideration, American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 70 (April 2000) 162-168. For an analysis of how children are inducted into America s consumer culture, see J. Schorr, Bom to Buy The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture (New York Scribner s, 2004). 

Sheila Pantry BA, ALA, is a qualified librarian with many years experience in library and information work. A varied career in iron and steel, engineering, research and the coal industry culminated in 1977 at the Health and Safety Executive, where she is Head of Library and Information Services. Author of many papers and a well-known speaker, Sheila Pantry has become a leading authority in the UK on the wide-ranging information associated with health and safety at work. She has also carried out consultancy work for Occupational Safety and Health organizations in Canada, Australia (Canberra), Jordan and Dublin, and is a computer addict. 

Some of these measures are part of larger, semistructured interviews administered by the therapist. The most commonly used assessments in this category are a family of instruments developed mainly in the Veterans Administration (VA) hospital system. The first instrument in this family is known as the Addiction Severity Index (ASI McLellan et al., 1985). The ASI assesses for a wide variety of biographical data, so it has the advantage of potentially being used as part of an intake interview. The ASI asks about consequences in a wide variety of life domains, and determines recent and lifetime patterns of drug and alcohol use. The ASI also detects recent and lifetime occurrence of problems in these different life domains (e.g., work). Each domain can be scored for the severity of the problems based upon the responses of the client and the clinical judgment of the interviewer. The ASI can be administered by computer to provide for rapid interpretation of answers. 

Strecher VJ, Shiffman S West R (2005). Randomized controlled trial of a web-based computer-tailored smoking cessation program as a supplement to nicotine patch therapy. Addiction, 100, 682-8... 

The fact that some DA neurons encode expectancy of reward is especially provocative, as it implies that dysfunctions within these circuits may give rise to erroneous computations of reward expectancy, which may in turn relate to the aberrant drug cravings observed so commonly in drug addiction. Satisfying such aberrant neural expectancies, then, may be a necessary component of any successful pharmacotherapy for addiction. 

Li, C., Mao, X., and Wei, L. 2008. Genes and (common) pathways underlying drug addiction. PLoS Computational Biology, 4(l) e2. doi 10.1371/joumal.pcbi.0040002 Available at http //compbiol.plosjournals.Org/archive/1553-7358/4/l/pdf/10.1371joumal.pcbi.004 0002-S.pdf. 

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