BBC reports research that shows there is a link between heavy Internet use and depression.

This seems to back up speculation here that excessive Wikipedia editing is simply unhealthy.

Careful - you're presuming that the causal link goes in one direction, when both seem about equally likely (my personal hypothesis is that it's self-reinforcing). But over-indulgence in almost any hobby is probably ill-advised, doubly so when that hobby is performed solo in front of a flickering monitor.

I don't consistently have any one emotional state from being active on Wikipedia (or Wikipedia Review); I find both sites alternately amusing, aggravating, recreational, infuriating, and lots of other emotions.

Personally speaking, my Wikipedia experience was more regressive than depressive, though there is no doubt about it having depressive effects, largely due to the constant repression of one's sense of outrage.

I think the regressive factor is due to the fact that I tried to play along with what is fundamentally a juvenile game, thinking that this act of good faith would serve as a fast, temporary form of ice-breaking and that it would facilitate learning in the long run — but the game just became more and more involutory and infantile as time wore on.

Jon Awbrey

I wasn't really presuming (and the article wasn't either) as to whether it was symptom or cause, but any rational person would agree that very long hours in front of a screen is either indicative of a problem or going to generate one.

Wikipedia has tended towards adulating those who spend a lot of time on Wikipedia - one of those things where the desires of the project are put against the well-being of its participants.

Still, it is helpful to have an article that gives some credence to the notion that Teh InterWeb might not be a healthy place. Makes you wonder if in 50 years time they'll be running slightly incredulous news stories on the days when governments spent large amounts of money trying to addict their population to the web.

May I make a mild protest here against the idea that the internet is a place, in the sense of ONE place. Like the Earth, the internet is plenty large enough to be thought of an interconnected series of places, from the most evil and time-wasting dens of iniquity, to online peer reviewed journals and meta-collections of genuine scholarship and knowledge, like arXive and pubmed.

Perhaps it's not good to be staring at a screen for so long that you don't excercise, but the same is true of staring at a book. Your computer screen, when connected to the net, has far, far more flexibility and power to improve your life than (say) your TV. Even a TV with 2000 channels.

So, I hate to see this all rolled up into what looks like one argument. The only problem with the best of the net is that it discourages aerobic excercise, and live social interaction (including live learning/teaching). But as long as get your RDA of those, the best of the net is almost as good it gets. Only an academic library is better, for reasons I've discussed already. One day, they'll fix info-retrieval so that unseen knowledge has a spacial component, so that it can be appreciated more. But I can think of ways to do that. Paper libraries have their charms, but they are not in theory forever indisposable. We just haven't figured out how to do it yet.

I think depressives are drawn toward the internet, I don't think the internet causes depression.