MUMBAI: For two months during the lockdown, 16-year-old Aditi Rao* stayed at a de-addiction facility on the fringes of Mumbai with very little access to her tab — her extension. Rao would be online the entire night and sleep during the day. Her body clock was so impaired that she could attend online school just about once a week. The tipping point came when she started to cut herself and became physically and verbally abusive with her parents as they had taken away her tab.
While such cases of selfharm— an extreme consequence of incessant screen use — are rare, de-addiction centres and mental health experts are increasingly finding themselves counselling adolescents who not only forget to eat in the throes of surfing, chatting, gaming or binge-watching, but also suffer withdrawal symptoms as alcohol, tobacco or drug addicts when denied access to their black mirror of choice. Exiled from their dopamine hit, they start lashing out, crying or cooking up excuses.
While there are currently no clinical diagnostic criteria for screen addiction, patients typically tend to use screens so compulsively that it impacts their productivity, social relationships, physical health or emotional well-being. Though the condition afflicts several adults, most patients seeking help belong to the 12-25 years age group, perhaps a consequence of scrutiny by parents about the trance-like hold of screens on their children during lockdown.
This is why, despite being well aware of the irony in offering online counselling for screen addiction, Muktangan — a Pune-based de-addiction centre that chiefly treats drug and alcohol addiction — decided to start holding virtual sessions during the lockdown after it received numerous calls from parents who asked if they treated children enslaved by the screen. Two months ago, in fact, the parents of a teenage girl told Muktangan coordinator Sonali Kale that every time they switched off the WiFi connection or changed the password of the laptop, their daughter would get violent, hit or bite her mother and break whatever was handy. When Kale had her first session with the girl, she was fidgeting with her hands, was not able to make proper eye contact and sounded incoherent.
Every month now, the centre enrols at least five to six cases of screen addiction, chiefly adolescent boys. Besides helping them realise the ill-effects of excess and introducing the concept of “screen time budget”, counsellors here use “reward techniques” to motivate a patient.
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DOPAMINE RUSH