You knew it had to come. When it was reported last week that a British rehabilitation clinic had begun treating patients for an uncontrollable addiction to text messaging, it certainly sounded like a sign of the times. Or something. It was hard to be sure of the precise significance of the announcement that The Priory, a clinic in London, had staked out this new territory in the relatively uncharted realm of techno-driven psychosis. But the fancy facility is known as one of the best acute psychiatric hospitals in Britain, so its doctors probably knew what they were doing when they identified unstoppable text messaging as a complaint comparable to eating disorders, alcoholism, drug abuse and stress-related illnesses.
Maybe they were alerted to the brand-new, epoch-defining disorder when they first heard that text messaging was insanely popular among some age groups in certain developed (or overdeveloped) countries -- Japan being as good an example as Britain.
Or maybe they simply observed their own teenage and twenty-something offspring in their leisure time and noted, with admirable professionalism, a correlation between their offspring's bad moods and separation from their (i.e., the offspring's) cell phones. Deprived of access to this communication lifeline -- by, say, a summons to join the family for dinner -- the subjects became "moody, irritable and unwell," as the BBC put it last week. Yet, when given free rein to "text," addicts often developed insomnia and eyestrain.