Teen Internet addicts likely to self harm

Teenagers who are addicted to the Internet are more likely to engage in self-harm behaviour, according to a recent study. Read on to know what researchers found.

Teenagers who are addicted to the Internet are more likely to engage in self-harm behaviour, according to an Australian-Chinese study. Researchers surveyed 1,618 adolescents aged 13 to 18 from China’s Guangdong Province about behaviour such as hitting themselves, pulling their own hair, or pinching or burning themselves and gave them a test to gauge Internet addiction.

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The test found that about 10 per cent of the students surveyed were moderately addicted to the Internet, while less than one per cent were severely addicted. The students ranked as moderately addicted to the Internet were 2.4 times more likely to have self-injured one to five times in the past 6 months than students without an addiction, said Dr Lawrence Lam from the University of Notre Dame Australia.

The moderately-to-severely addicted students were almost five times more likely than non-addicted students to have self-injured six or more times in the past 6 months, Lam and his colleagues from Guangzhou’s Sun Yat-Sen University reported.

“In recent years, with the greater availability of the Internet in most Asian countries, Internet addiction has become an increasing mental problem among adolescents,” the researchers said in their study published in the journal Injury Prevention. “Many studies have reported associations between Internet addiction, psychiatric symptoms and depression among adolescents.”