Social media addiction new challenge in Valley

Azhar Qadri

Tribune News Service

Srinagar, February 8

The first of the new-age addiction cases at Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (IMHANS) in Srinagar came in winter last year when a young woman was found addicted to ‘Blue Whale’— an online game which challenged players to do self-harm and also commit suicide.

The doctors who treated her found that she had crossed several levels of the game and in the process had harmed herself, becoming the first known patient of the game in the Kashmir valley.

“She was the first such case. She had an aggressive behaviour and had frequent fights at her school after which she stopped going to the school. She had started spending more time on social media and that is how she was introduced to Blue Whale,” said Zaid Ahmad Wani, a doctor at IMHANS.

Since then, a steady trickle of young patients has been treated and counselled for various additions linked to social media and mobile Internet games. “It is a completely new phenomenon which we are witnessing,” the doctor said. “People are spending a lot of time on social media and also on playing games,” he said.

The social media and gaming addiction is an addition to already grim mental health situation in the Valley where a large section of society is suspected to be suffering from stress and related illnesses.

Wani said he had treated more than 10 patients with the social media and gaming addiction in the past few months and described it as a “dangerous phenomenon”.

“There is a lack of awareness among parents about it. They come to us only when grades of their wards suffer at school, ” he said.

He said the gaming disorder was “similar to drug addiction” in a way that it resulted in increase of dopamine output. “These patients are usually lonely and they have inferiority complex,” he said. “What they lack in real life, they find it in the gaming world where they become team leaders and have access to power and money,” he said.

Arshad Hussain, a senior doctor at IMHANS and a professor at the department of psychiatry of GMC, Srinagar, said the gaming disorder was a “recent addiction” and there was an ongoing debate about how to deal with it.