Phone addiction leads to 'panicky' withdrawals, but is a handset all you are taking away?
Another study, another smartphone addiction proof. Researchers at King's College in London probed a whopping number of 41 studies that analyze 42,000 adolescents to look into what the study, issued in BMC Psychiatry, calls "problematic smartphone usage."
We will spare you the suspense, as the studies predictably found issues that in 25% of the young people bordered on addiction, complete with withdrawal symptoms when, say, parents took away their phones.
They exhibited up to "panicky" behavior, turning quickly into depression and lack of sleep. According to Nicola Kalk, from the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King's College London:
Smartphones are here to stay and there is a need to understand the prevalence of problematic smartphone usage. We don't know whether it is the smartphone itself that can be addictive or the apps that people use.
Nevertheless, there is a need for public awareness around smartphone use in children and young people, and parents should be aware of how much time their children spend on their phones
Nevertheless, there is a need for public awareness around smartphone use in children and young people, and parents should be aware of how much time their children spend on their phones
Pretty boilerplate, don't you think? What was actually surprising is that just a quarter of the surveyed adolescents exhibited such phone-withdrawal symptoms, what with all the warnings that handsets are dooming a whole generation.
In fact, Amy Orben, A research fellow at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit at the University of Cambridge, was quick to warn against premature conclusions: "It has been shown previously that smartphone effects are not a one-way street, but that mood can impact the amount of smartphone use, as well."
It's a common sense conclusion, as what parents take away when they limit their teen's access to their phone, or ban it altogether, is not just the device that takes pictures, serves websites, or plays music.
Your friendship connections are often on the phone, and the complex social life teens (or adults, for that matter) have carefully built around the phone as a vessel of those networks, can really lead to withdrawal symptoms, if abruptly terminated.
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