Prevalence of Problematic Internet Use in a Clinical Sample of University Students

While the internet possesses great capacity to facilitate education, communication, information gathering, and the pragmatics of everyday life, it may become detrimental for some who use it excessively. With increased penetration of internet users via smartphone, the potential misuse of the internet and social media platforms has become a prominent global concern. However, there is a lack of consensus for conceptualizing and assessing technology-driven problems such as “internet addiction” or “problematic internet use,” which results in widely varying prevalence rates of these issues in convenience samples of nontreatment-seeking adults, college students, and adolescents. The present study is novel in that it examines self-report archival data from a treatment-seeking sample of university students at a university-based counseling center. A review of 2,280 consecutive assessment forms obtained before the first intake interview revealed that 147 clients (6.45%) indicated some type of problematic internet or computer use, with preoccupation with surfing the internet and pornography viewing as the leading concerns. Nine percent of this subsample indicated an internet-related concern as one of their main reasons for seeking clinic assistance. Although a relatively low percentage of students expressed primary distress involving the internet or gaming, an implication of these results is that systematic assessment of these concerns should become ubiquitous in clinical settings, especially clinics that assist emerging adults attending institutions of higher education.