Inside the Seattle clinic that treats tech addiction like heroin, and clients detox for up to 16 weeks

At age six, Sarah Hill was handed her first iPad by her parents, which she used to play games like Angry Birds and Minecraft whenever she was bored. By age 21, the Alabama native had fallen so deep into virtual reality experiences and playing video games that she’d stopped seeing friends, showering, and brushing her teeth. “If you compare video game and tech addiction to drugs,” she says, “VR is the meth of drugs.”

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At college, she spent so much time holed up in her room compulsively accessing a chatbot site, Character AI, on her phone that she failed classes. “I remember the night I told my parents I’d lied about everything and I flunked,” she recalls. “My parents didn’t have any words. They were like, ‘Just go.’ I went to my room, but the last thing I saw was my mom resting her elbows on the counter and just crying. That was the worst thing I ever saw.”

Hill’s parents flew with her from Alabama to a town just outside of Seattle and enrolled her at reSTART, one of the nation’s few residential treatment programs for digital overuse that treats tech addiction as a danger on the scale of alcohol or drug addiction. Clients are required to abstain from the internet, smartphones, gaming, and other technologies—often for months at a time. On her first day there screen-free, Hill lay down on her bed and cried.

Hill and reSTART’s other clients are at the center of an intense debate about how harmfully addictive modern tech can be. Once waged mostly in academic white papers and over dinner tables, it has escalated to the courts, thanks to a slew of landmark legal cases against Meta, YouTube, TikTok, and Snap. (The last two reached settlements earlier this year. TikTok declined to comment for this article, and Snap did not respond to requests for comment.) These initial “bellwether” cases are being closely watched because their outcomes could provide precedent for the thousands of other lawsuits filed making similar claims—and even force tech companies to change their products and business models. Some have anticipated a “Big Tobacco moment”—a reference to the 1990s lawsuits against tobacco companies that proved they were aware of the addictive nature of nicotine and the health dangers of smoking, and led to massive damages paid.

In the case against Meta and YouTube, a now 20-year-old plaintiff, referred to as KGM, testified in February that the “addictive design” of these platforms, including infinite scroll, filters, and autoplay, led her to spend up to 16 hours a day on them, causing depression, anxiety, body dysmorphia, and self-harm. (A jury was deliberating the case as this article went to press.)

The Big Tech companies deny these claims, saying they did their best to protect free expression while keeping users safe. They question the whole concept of “tech addiction,” pointing out that there’s no scientific evidence that their products were the cause of KGM’s and others’ issues. The head of Meta’s Instagram, Adam Mosseri, said in court that social media was not “clinically addictive.” And in a written statement, a Meta spokesperson points to other factors in KGM’s life as the cause of her troubles, adding: “The evidence simply doesn’t support reducing a lifetime of hardship to a single factor, and our case will continue to underscore that reality.”

Reached for comment about YouTube, a spokesperson for owner Google, José Castaneda, said allegations about the platform were “simply not true.” “Providing young people with a safer, healthier experience has always been core to our work,” he said. He pointed to the company’s “services and policies to provide young people with age-appropriate experiences, and parents with robust controls.”

Sarah Hill.Chona Kasinger for Fortune

But concerned parents—along with researchers, health organizations, and even some former tech industry leaders—are sounding the alarm, saying that the systems we rely on for modern life are designed in ways that may be fundamentally incompatible with human well-being. They cite a growing body of research in psychology and neuroscience arguing that social media use delivers dopamine jolts similar to those associated with addictive drugs like meth or heroin. And with the rapid acceleration of AI, many are calling for the U.S. government to get serious about regulation and pleading with Big Tech to provide stronger safety features that constrain the algorithms, push notifications, and endless swiping that make it so hard to put your phone down.

“Unfortunately, [tech] is taking mostly young people away from the most important thing in their lives and key to their mental health, and that is relationships with other people,” says New York University professor and podcaster Scott Galloway. For tech companies, he says, it’s all about keeping users’ attention locked in: “I don’t think [Big Tech] set out in their business plans to depress global youth. I think their algorithms discovered that rage, self-esteem, and funny cat vid