Psychological impact of the new digital media

This review article starts from the hypothesis that the new digital media's impact on people's mental health, which in professional and private everyday life has become increasingly frequent and intense, is widely underestimated. The disturbances associated with media exposure, which have been already described and examined, are presented and discussed, while classifying them in three groups of disorders, namely dissocial, dissociative and impulse control disorders. In a second step, psychotherapeutic and psychiatric applications of the digital media are presented, especially, psychometric and neuropsychological testing, distribution of information and behavioral therapeutic tools. The positive and negative effects of the internet and cyberspace are applied to the multicausal understanding of the genesis and therapy of mental disturbances. Against this background, the opinion is held, that the paradigmatic medialization of the world has to be taken seriously and actively approached as a psychoecological factor with psychosocial, psychopathogenic and also neuroplastic effects. Therefore, also a psychiatric approach is needed to establish both research on media-associated disorders including their therapy and the development of quality standards in the therapeutic use of the Internet and Cyberspace.