Hookedon phones

The data say it all: their lives re­volve around a de­vice. The de­pen­dency of teenagers on elec­tronic de­vices, es­pe­cially mo­bile phones, may have al­ready passed the point of no re­turn. The typ­i­cal pro­file is well-de­fined. Ac­cord­ing to Unicef’s lat­est re­port on the im­pact of tech­nol­ogy among young peo­ple, chil­dren on av­er­age get their first mo­bile phone at the age of 11, some 80% of young peo­ple are “hooked” to a min­i­mum of three so­cial net­works, and most con­nect to the in­ter­net every day, and for a min­i­mum of five hours a day. The head of the study, An­to­nio Rial, a pro­fes­sor of psy­chol­ogy at the Uni­ver­sity of San­ti­ago de Com­postela, speaks bluntly about a “pub­lic health prob­lem” that is hav­ing a major im­pact on the daily lives of chil­dren.

The re­port, which as­sesses the re­sponses of 50,000 sec­ondary school pupils around Spain, states that the de­pen­dency on smart­phones is so high that more than half of teenagers sleep with their de­vice close to hand, with 20% say­ing they use it after mid­night. One of the most com­mon prob­lems among young peo­ple is an ad­dic­tion to on­line gam­bling.

How­ever, clin­i­cal psy­chol­o­gist Elena Flo­res, from the ad­dic­tive be­hav­iour unit at Sant Joan de Déu Hos­pi­tal, says that the prob­lem goes fur­ther. “The mo­bile phone is used as a tool to ac­cess cer­tain ap­pli­ca­tions that can end up being ad­dic­tive and that cre­ate in the per­son the same pat­tern as other sub­stances,” she ex­plains, adding: “We don’t find peo­ple ad­dicted to Out­look, but we do see prob­lem­atic use in the case of In­sta­gram.” As a group, girls are more prone to be­come ad­dicted to apps, while boys have more trou­ble with on­line gam­ing. “In the field of men­tal health we have a di­ag­no­sis for video game ad­dic­tion but we don’t have one for ex­ces­sive use of apps,” she says, call­ing it “a step back­wards in terms of re­search and pre­ven­tion in the pub­lic men­tal health net­work.”

More data about patho­log­i­cal gam­bling and other be­hav­ioural ad­dic­tions come from the psy­chi­atric ser­vice of Bel­lvitge Uni­ver­sity Hos­pi­tal. As of Sep­tem­ber, 231 pa­tients aged 16 to 21 had been treated: 63.6% for gam­bling; 26.4% for video game ad­dic­tion; 8.2% for other prob­lems re­lated to new tech­nolo­gies; 0.4% for pur­chases; 0.4% for sex; and 0.9% for other rea­sons. “The mo­bile phone is the gate­way, the in­stru­ment through which one falls into ad­dic­tion,” say hos­pi­tal sources.

Flo­res ac­knowl­edges that the lines be­tween use, overuse and ad­dic­tion are thin. “Rather han the num­ber of hours, we talk about overuse of de­vices when there is an as­so­ci­ated prob­lem, such as im­pair­ment in aca­d­e­mic per­for­mance, so­cial iso­la­tion or be­hav­iour prob­lems, and we talk about ad­dic­tion when this sit­u­a­tion lasts over time and re­quires treat­ment.”

The Unicef study also found that 44% of young peo­ple con­nect so as not to feel alone and 58% do so to make friends. Fam­i­lies claim to have con­trol over their chil­dren’s in­ter­net use, but the study in­sists that it is more of a feel­ing than a re­al­ity. Most young peo­ple have more than one on­line pro­file, al­low­ing them to in­ter­act sep­a­rately with fam­ily and friends.

Is there such a thing as nor­mal mo­bile phone use? The an­swer from Sant Joan de Déu Hos­pi­tal is clear: “We don’t talk about nor­mal use be­cause nor­malcy today is overuse. It’s bet­ter to talk about re­spon­si­ble use,” says Flo­res.

In par­tic­u­lar, the ex­perts warn about the role of elec­tronic de­vices as the gate­way to the in­ter­net: 22.5% of teens have been bul­lied on­line or in­volved in ha­rass­ing an­other per­son. Con­sump­tion of pornog­ra­phy also claims a place in the rank­ing, with 35% of teenagers ad­mit­ting to using it, while 4.7% say they have been on the dark web, which has pae­dophile con­tent.

In 2022, it will be 10 years since the De­sconect@ pro­gramme began, which was de­signed to deal with ad­dic­tions to new tech­nol­ogy. The pro­gramme’s di­rec­tor, Marc Masip, be­lieves that so­ci­ety “is be­com­ing more aware of the prob­lems from overuse of mo­bile phones,” and he adds that tech­nol­ogy com­pa­nies “see in chil­dren a good op­por­tu­nity to do busi­ness.”

Masip com­pares mo­bile phone ad­dic­tion to drug ad­dic­tion and calls for “more train­ing for par­ents or changes in the law to allow more con­trol over the ac­cess of mi­nors to on­line games or pornog­ra­phy, for ex­am­ple. “Mo­bile phones could be banned at school,” he says, ad­mit­ting “we are late”, and point­ing out that “adults are not al­ways a good ex­am­ple, as the main cause of traf­fic ac­ci­dents is the use of mo­biles while dri­ving.” Masip ad­mits that the pan­demic has seen a rise in the num­ber of teenagers hooked on mo­bile phones, but adds that it is also be­cause “the de­tec­tion of ex­ist­ing cases has in­creased, as par­ents have now had more of a chance to see how their chil­dren be­have.”

fea­ture liv­ing on­line