Study shows lack of sleep and increased stress
accompany pathological internet use in contributing to depression among
Chinese teens
Teenagers who spend excessive
amounts of time on the Internet are one and a half times more likely to
develop depression than moderate web users, a study in
China has found.
Researcher
Lawrence Lam described some of the signs of excessive use spending at
least five to more than 10 hours a day on the web, agitation when the
teens is not in front of the computer and loss of interest in social
interaction.
“Some spend more than 10 hours a day, they are really
problematic users and they show signs and symptoms of addictive
behaviour ... browsing the Internet, playing games,” said Mr. Lam,
co-author of the paper which was published on Tuesday in the Archives of
Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.
“They can’t get their minds
off the Internet, they feel agitated if they don’t get back on after a
short period of being away,” the psychologist at Sydney’s University of
Notre Dame’s School of Medicine said in a telephone interview.
“They don’t want to see friends, don’t want to join family gatherings, don’t want to spend time with parents or siblings.”
The
study involved 1,041 teenagers aged between 13 and 18 years in China’s
southern Guangzhou city who were free of depression at the start of the
investigation.
Nine months later, 84 of them were assessed as
suffering from depression and those who were on the Internet excessively
were one-and-a-half times more vulnerable than moderate users.
“Results suggested that young people who are initially free of
mental health
problems but use the Internet pathologically could develop depression
as a consequence,” wrote Mr. Lam, who co-authored the paper with Zi-wen
Peng at the Sun Yat-Sen University’s School of Public Health in
Guangzhou.
The depression might be a result of lack of sleep and stress from competitive online games, he explained.
“People
who spend so much time on the Internet will lose sleep and it is a very
well established fact that the less one sleeps, the higher the chances
of depression,” Mr. Lam said.
Mr. Lam said this was the first study looking into pathological use of the Internet as a possible cause for depression.
A
previous study pointed to depression as a possible causal factor for
Internet addiction, while several other studies showed a link between
the two without clearly pointing which was the cause and which one the
result.
Mr. Lam called for schools to screen students for Internet addiction, so they may receive counseling and treatment.