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Every other Thursday night, Maddie (using only her first name, in keeping with the program’s anonymity) heads to the Atlanta Triangle Club for a 12-Step recovery program called Internet and Technology Addicts Anonymous, known as ITAA. There, Maddie and over a dozen other attendees share their daily struggles with internet addiction disorder. “For so long I avoided saying it, but I was an internet addict who couldn’t stop,” Maddie says. “I need the fellowship to keep me consistent on my recovery and honest with myself.”
As today’s information age increases our reliance on digital technology, internet addiction disorder—a wideranging addiction that covers gaming, online shopping, pornography, doomscrolling, and excessive research—has become a serious problem; research suggests between 5 and 10 percent of Americans qualify as internet addicts. The disorder is still being studied, but people struggling with the issue turned to the 12-Step model—established by Alcoholics Anonymous in the 1930s—to build a peer-based recovery system for internet addicts. ITAA launched in 2017 with a few groups worldwide; it has grown quickly since then, and now has thousands of members, with over 130 weekly online and in-person meetings held in seven different languages.
Maddie, who is 28 and an Atlanta native, started playing video games in elementary school. During high school, it became part of her evening social life, and by the time she was at a local college, she was spending a minimum of 14 hours a day online. “I wasn’t a functioning adult at that rate, and I still didn’t think I had a problem,” she says. “Technology is so normalized in engineering or ‘nerd’ circles that no one around me questioned it.” She started missing classes and failed several.
Cat (also just her first name), mid-30s, is from Gwinnett and attends ITAA meetings on Thursdays. Cat’s internet habit began as research for her health and wellness business, but during the pandemic, that habit ballooned into listening to podcasts and scrolling her phone and laptop for up to 12 hours a day. “I didn’t think it was a bad thing to be inside learning, especially during the pandemic,” Cat explains. But over time, she says, “I stopped caring for myself, and my problem became compulsive.”
Both Maddie and Cat got their lives back on track through therapy and ITAA. Maddie also attended a treatment center in Seattle, where she practiced abstinence and developed offline hobbies. The treatment center also gave her the time to reflect on her gender identity; she now identifies as a transgender woman. Today, she uses technology for two hours a day and has returned to school to finish her degree. Cat’s therapist warned of internet addiction, and Cat found an online ITAA meeting, where she met another person struggling with compulsive learning. She now restricts her internet use to three-and-a-half hours a day, and uses a Light Phone, whose capabilities are limited to calls, texts, GPS, and music.
Both Maddie and Cat have attended ITAA Atlanta since 2022. Cat says the program draws all kinds of people dealing with internet addiction disorder, from young teenagers to people in their 80s. “Technology is ubiquitous in life at this point,” she says. “You don’t have to be an extreme case to be in a problematic place.”
This article appears in our September 2024 issue.
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