3.6. Specificity and Comorbidity
It appears essential to pay adequate attention to (i) the specificity of SNS addiction and (ii) potential comorbidity. Hall et al. [103] outline three reasons why it is necessary to address comorbidity between mental disorders, such as addictions. First, a large number of mental disorders feature additional (sub)clinical problems/disorders. Second, comorbid conditions must be addressed in clinical practice in order to improve treatment outcomes. Third, specific prevention programs may be developed which incorporate different dimensions and treatment modalities that particularly target associated mental health problems. From this it follows that assessing the specificity and potential comorbidities of SNS addiction is important. However, to date, research addressing this topic is virtually non-existent. There has been almost no research on the co-occurrence of SNS addiction with other types of addictive behavior, mainly because there have been so few studies examining SNS addiction as highlighted in the previous section. However, based on the small empirical base, there are a number of speculative assumptions that can be made about co-addiction co-morbidity in relation to SNS addiction.