A private hospital in Amritsar has opened Punjab’s first mobile de-addiction centre that provides digital detox services to kids as well as adults. The centre is run by a team of 7 members, including a psychiatrist, two pharmacists and three counsellors.
What exactly are these de-addiction centres?
These clinics try to address the issue of mobile-addiction through proper counselling and by bringing in necessary lifestyle changes. The counsellors here work on the sleep timings of the patient, engage them in physical activities, try to increase communication between kids and parents and even make slots when both parents and kids will not use phones.
“We opened the first internet de-addiction centre in north India to deal with rising cases of internet addiction among kids, teens and youngsters,” Dr Jag Deep Pal Bhatia, a neuropsychiatric and one of its founder member, told The Tribune.
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Why are they needed?
Constant browsing of social media through smartphone can have a devastating effect on your mental health. Dr Bhatia listed out irritation, depression, loneliness, isolation as the possible consequences of mobile addiction. The lack of communication between parents and kids further aggravates the problem.
The de-addiction activities at these detox clinics are tailored for specific age groups and the de-addiction is based on lifestyle changes, The News Minute reported
Experts say that parents feed their kids while they are watching rhymes and cartoons on phone. This starts at an age as early as three or four years, but the continued exposure converts this habit into an addiction.
How does this affect you?
Mobile addiction develops disastrous behaviours in children and adults, like self-harm. Most of the cell-phone addicts stay isolated all day in order to use their phone. Because of this addiction, children also stop taking care of their personal hygiene and become stubborn.
A study on ‘Smartphone Dependency’ conducted by Aligarh Muslim University came out with a startling revelation. The study found that on an average varsity students check their mobile devices as many as 150 times in a day supposedly due to the fear and anxiety of missing out on informations. The group found that nearly 63 per cent of the respondents used smartphones for four to seven hours daily while only 13 per cent of those surveyed used their smartphones for three hours or less every day. The researchers were shocked to find out that nearly 23 per cent students were logging more than eight hours on their smartphones daily.
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