But not all agree with that prescription. She has been among the pioneers in another treatment approach, online counseling. But that form of treatment has drawn its own detractors. In addition to being ethically questionable, I don't think it is particularly effective to treat patients with the very tool through which they are dissociating. Dr. Sealy insists online therapy has both positive and negative aspects.
Many addicts become so isolated that they have no other way of relating.
This may provide a method by which they can reach out and seek help. But recovery needs to be experiential. The patient will inevitably need to interact with a therapist and will likely need to be confronted, and neither of those can be accomplished very well via computer. The role of the computer in the life of a recovering Internet addict is also controversial. Although many therapists say the increasingly ubiquitous Internet will require most patients to find ways to coexist with their computers, much as compulsive overeaters need to learn to eat moderately, others still counsel abstinence from the Web.