Oh Good: China Ends Electroshock Therapy for Game Addicts, Wait What?

Because exploding Battle Royale collars were deemed too humane.

So what’s the part of this story I should be reporting on, the fact that the Chinese Government has ordered an internet addiction clinic to stop electrocuting its teenage patients, or the fact that a Chinese internet addiction clinic was electrocuting its teenage patients? Yeah, I’m going to go with the latter.

“The China Daily reported last month that more than 3,000 young people were tricked or forced into the four-month long course. To enroll their children, parents or guardians had to sign a contract acknowledging that they would be given electric shocks of up to 200 milliamperes. The treatment cost 6,000 yuan ($878) per month. Patients were considered “cured” or “reborn” once they admitted to their addiction.

According to the Guangdong-based Information Times, shocks were given if patients broke any of the center’s 86 rules, which included prohibitions on eating chocolate, locking the bathroom door, taking pills before a meal, and sitting in Dr. Yang’s chair without permission.

Details of the treatment first became public when former patients wrote about their experiences online. In addition to the electric shocks, they claimed that they were not allowed to talk about anything other than overcoming their Internet addiction, ordered to kneel in front of their parents to show obedience, and forced to confess to “wrongdoing.”

So parents were paying almost $900 a month to have their kids cured from presumably World of Warcraft or Starcraft addiction by being electrically shocked in what sounds like more or less jail? Now that’s the end of a “turn off that computer” arguement I would have never seen coming.

Yes, video game addiction exists, and there are probably effective ways to combat it. But I would think they have to do more with going outside and playing pickup soccer rather than being thrown in a psych ward and shocked with electrodes. And when the Chinese government says your techniques are too forceful, that’s when you know you should probably sit down and scrub your moral compass with some steel wool.

[China Daily via Gamepolitics]