Teenagers who are addicted to the Internet are more likely to develop depression or other psychiatric problems than teens who are classified as normal Internet users, a new study says.
Researchers in Australia and China studied pathological or uncontrolled Internet use and later mental health problems in 1,041 teenage students in China. The students were free of depression and anxiety at the start of the study.
Sixty-two of the teenagers were classified at the start of the study as being moderately pathological users of the Internet, and two were found to be severely at risk for uncontrollable urges to go online. Nine months later, the youngsters were evaluated again for anxiety and depression and 87 were judged as having developed depression. Eight reported significant anxiety symptoms.
Researchers say that their work suggests that teens who use the Internet pathologically may be about 2.5 times more likely to develop depression than teens who are not addicted to the Internet.
“This type of addictive surfing can have a serious impact on mental health,” lead author Catriona Morrison, DPhil, of the University of Leeds, says in a news release. “The Internet now plays a huge part in modern life, but its benefits are accompanied by a darker side.” She tells WebMD in an email that the Internet provides a “refuge for certain types of people” and that “Internet addiction seems to be a bona fide syndrome.” For most people, the Internet is adaptive “and helps us function well in our daily lives,” she says. But for some people, “it is compulsive and damaging.” “What is not clear is what causes what, so the next step is to ask: Does the Internet make you depressed or is it the case that depressed people are drawn to the Internet?” she says.
Morrison’s research team studied 1,319 people aged 16-51 who were evaluated for Internet addiction and depression. Eighteen participants (1.2%) were classified as being addicted to the Internet.
“This result suggests that young people who are initially free of mental health problems but use the Internet pathologically could develop depression as a consequence,” the authors write. “As we understand that mental health problems among adolescents bear a significant personal cost as well as costs to the community, early intervention and prevention that targets at-risk groups with identified risk factors is effective in reducing the burden of depression among young people.”
The study is published online in advance of the October print issue of Archives of Paediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.
Teens and Internet Addiction
The researchers say screening young people who may be at risk of Internet addiction may be a good idea in all high schools to identify those who may need counselling or treatment. The youths in the study were between 13 and 18 and attended high schools in Guangzhou, China. Researchers say the findings
“have direct implications for the prevention of mental illness in young people, particularly in developing countries.”
They write that although previous research has found that pathological Internet users are mostly young men with introverted personalities, the rates of psychiatric symptoms among girls are rising.
The researchers say that most of the youths in the study, 93.6%, were classified as normal users. The study reports that:
45.5% said the most common use of the Internet was for entertainment.
28.1% said they used the Internet to search for information.
26.4% said they used the Internet to avoid boredom, make friends, or communicate with school chums.
“Young people who used the Internet pathologically were more likely to use it for entertainment and less likely to use it for information,” the authors say.
The growing number of researchers on this topic indicates that Internet addiction is a psychosocial disorder, and its characteristics are as follows: affective disorders and problems in social relations tolerance, withdrawal symptoms. Internet usage creates social, psychological, school and/or work difficulties in a person’s life.
Seventy-nine percent of study participants were pathological Internet users, whose excessive use of the Internet was causing, social, academic, and interpersonal problems. Excessive Internet use may create a heightened level of psychological arousal, resulting in failure to eat for long periods, little sleep, and limited physical activity, possibly leading to the user experiencing physical and mental health problems such as obsessive-compulsive disorder, low family relationships, psychological depression, and general anxiety.
The fact that Internet addiction and depression relationship is the aim of this study to know the prevalence of internet addiction and associated existing psychopathology in adolescent age group, and to determine the association of psychiatric symptoms with Internet addiction by controlling for the effects of demographic variables such as gender, marital status, age, and educational levels.
Internet addiction and depression
Many studies have been conducted to test whether there is any relationship between internet addiction and depression; in August 1995, scientist Young from University of Pittsburgh, conducted a research about her new theory that the internet is becoming an addiction to people, she used 396 people who are dependent on the internet and another 100 as a control group of non-dependents, by doing a survey of 8 questions the people who answered 5 or more as yes were labelled as addicted to the internet usage, as a result, she found out that people who are addicted to the internet are more prone to develop depression or other disease conditions like bipolar disorders, finding out that the dependents are usually newly introduced to the internet.
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