Internet Addiction and Teen Depression Linked

In a new investigation conducted on Chinese adolescents, experts determined that teens that used the Internet constantly, and for many hours each day, were significantly more likely to be depressed. Two groups of young adults were followed for nine months – one whose members appeared to be addicted to the Internet, and another whose members were not particular fans of the World Wide Web. Teens from the first group used the Internet pathologically, and they proved 250 percent more likely to have depressive tendencies, at the end of the nine-month long investigation, LiveScience reports.

Details of the new investigation will appear in the October print issue of the respected American Medical Association (AMA) journal Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine. A preview of the work is already available online. The study itself was conducted by experts Lawrence Lam, who is based in Australia, at the University of Notre Dame in Fremantle, and Zi-Wen Peng, who holds an appointment at the SunYat-Sen University School of Public Health, in China. The scientists and their colleagues investigated more than 1,041 high-school students, all aged 13 through 18.

The basic conclusion of the investigation is that excessive Internet use is very detrimental to teens' mental health status. What is very concerning is the fact that even healthy individuals, who showed absolutely no signs of any psychiatric problems at the beginning of the research, developed symptoms associated with depression following nine months of using the Internet pathologically. The team admits however that the correlation between the two may not be a direct one. It could be, for example, that excessive use of the Web causes other disorders, which then led to depression as a side-effect.

In order to gage test participants' level of Internet addiction, the experts asked them questions including “How often do you feel depressed, moody, or nervous when you are off-line, which goes away once you are back on-line?”, “How often do your grades or school work suffer because of the amount of time you spend on-line?” and “How often do you choose to spend more time on-line over going out with others?” An additional questionnaire was aimed at determining whether the respondents were mentally sane or not.