Clinic for internet addicts opens in US

If you have to take a quick break from reading this article to check your Blackberry, send a text or reboot your Xbox 360 before you reach the end of this paragraph, then the good news is that help is at hand.

reSTART has been opened outside Seattle, the rain-soaked north-western town where high-tech companies are as common as cattle are in Texas. It claims to be America's first residential detox centre for internet addicts.

For a little over $14,000, up to six people at a time can spend 45 days sweating out their insatiable urge to be umbilically connected to cyberspace. Think cold turkey as experienced by heroin junkies, and you get the general idea.

Residents are given counselling and psychotherapy, as well as encouraged to bond as a group in activities such as household chores, walks in the grounds and exercising.

The centre, in five acres about 30 miles out of Seattle, is the brainchild of Hilarie Cash, a therapist who had until this summer been treating patients with presumed internet addiction but only on a day-by-day basis.

She recorded her first case in 1994, with a patient so glued to video games that he forfeited his marriage and two jobs.