A San Diego researcher says that addiction to Google Glass™ is a real thing. And while no one's denying that it's probably pretty fun to walk around pretending you are a Terminator, the concept of being addicted to an expensive piece of technology sounds like the truest reason the 'first world problems' meme was invented.
According to Andrew Doan, a San Diego addiction researcher at the U.S. Navy's Substance Abuse and Recovery Program (SARP), a man with an actual addiction to Google Glass™ has been discovered. Doan published a paper on it in a journal called Addictive Behaviors, LA Weekly reports.
Doan wrote that the 31-year-old man initially came to SARP because he was an alcoholic, but that the patient also revealed a severe Google Glass™ problem. He would wear the device for sometimes 18 hours a day, and became irritated when he would have to take it off. He would also frequently move his hand up to his temple and tap, as if he were turning Google Glass™ on. It should be noted that the patient also had a history of mood disorders involving depression, anxiety and OCD.
Doan says that the “rush” people get from using Google Glass™ can be similar to the rush people get from using drugs. Given that there's a TV show called My Strange Addiction where people are fixated with drinking paint, snorting baby powder and eating their dead loved one's ashes, Google Glass™ almost feels like a tamer addiction. This type of addiction would under the category of Internet Addiction Disorder (IAD), which would apply to the surfing the web, social media, gaming and other technology-related time wasters. While IAD is not recognized by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders yet, Doan says he thinks forms of digital addiction inevitably will be and merits additional study.
For this particular patient, it was recommended he stop drinking and using Google Glass™ entirely. From the article's conclusion:
Over the course of his 35-day residential treatment, the patient noted a reduction in irritability, reduction in motor movements to his temple to turn on the device, and improvements in his short-term memory and clarity of thought processes. He continued to intermittently experience dreams as if looking through the device. To our knowledge, this is the first reported case of IAD involving problematic use of Google Glass™.
