Amish future. But the research is now making it clear that the Internet is not just another delivery system. It is creating a whole new mental environment, a digital state of nature where the human mind becomes a spinning instrument panel, and few people will survive unscathed.This is an issue as important and unprecedented as climate change, says Susan Greenfield, a pharmacology professor at Oxford University who is working on a book about how digital culture is rewiring usand not for the better. We could create the most wonderful world for our kids but thats not going to happen if were in denial and people sleepwalk into these technologies and end up glassy-eyed zombies.Does the Internet make us crazy? Not the technology itself or the content, no. But a Newsweek review of findings from more than a dozen countries finds the answers pointing in a similar direction. Peter Whybrow, the director of the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA, argues that the computer is like electronic cocaine, fueling cycles of mania followed by depressive stretches. The Internet leads to behavior that people are conscious is not in their best interest and does leave them anxious and does make them act compulsively, says Nicholas Carr, whose book The Shallows, about the Webs effect on cognition, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. It fosters our obsessions, dependence, and stress reactions, adds Larry Rosen, a California psychologist who has researched the Nets effect for decades. It encouragesand even promotesinsanity.Fear that the Internet and mobile technology contributes to addictionnot to mention the often related ADHD and OCD disordershas persisted for decades, but for most of that time the naysayers prevailed, often puckishly. Whats next? Microwave abuse and Chapstick addiction? wrote a peer reviewer for one of the leading psychiatric journals, rejecting a national study of problematic Internet use in 2006. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders has never included a category of machine-human interactions.But that view is suddenly on the outs. When the new DSM is released next year, Internet Addiction Disorder will be included for the first time, albeit in an appendix tagged for further study. China, Taiwan, and Korea recently accepted the diagnosis, and began treating problematic Web use as a grave national health crisis. In those countries, where tens of millions of people (and as much as 30 percent of teens) are considered Internet-addicted, mostly to gaming, virtual reality, and social media, the story is sensational front-page news. One young couple neglected its infant to death while nourishing a virtual baby online. A young man fatally bludgeoned his mother for suggesting he log off (and then used her credit card to rack up more hours). At least 10 ultra-Web users, serviced by one-click noodle delivery, have died of blood clots from sitting too long.Now the Korean government is funding treatment centers, and coordinating a late-night Web shutdown for young people. China, meanwhile, has launched a mothers crusade for safe Web habits, turning to that approach after it emerged that some doctors were using electro-shock and severe beatings to