Text dis-orders and textaphrenia!

"Textiety"

'Textaphrenia'

"Adult-Text addiction"

Mobile phones are carried by almost every individual in today’s world. It is especially very popular amongst the teenagers and more or less it has become a necessity for them. Amongst various disorders that are found, in a recent research study which I came across. According to Jennie Carroll, a technological researcher from Australia claimed that text messaging has become an integral part of the youngsters. She has recently discovered four risks that youngsters face from extreme texting.

Firstly, she talks about textaphrenia, which is hearing texts or feeling their mobile vibrate when it actually has not. Constantly checking his/her mobile to see if a message has arrived or not. Secondly, she has identified Textiety, which is the anxiety teens feel when they have not received a text or are unable to send texts. They feel as if they have no friends and will also over-analyze why people do not respond to their messages. Thirdly, she talks about the Post-traumatic text disorder, which is physical and mental injuries sustained while texting (e.g. walking into a pole while texting) and feelings of depression when no one texts them. Lastly, she mentions Binge texting, which is sending lots of individual texts or group texts to get as many responses as possible so they can feel like part of a group. According to the Daily Telegraph reports, an Australian researcher, how teenagers are becoming “text addicts” with symptoms such as mental disorders such as anxiety, insecurity, depression, and low self-esteem in addition to physical ones like “repetitive thumb syndrome”. Also an Australian mobile network’s statistics confirm the prevalence of text messaging, which has increased 89% over the last two years. One teenage customer was even reported to have sent an astounding 4,000 text messages over a period of nine days, which must surely lead to some serious repetitive thumb syndrome.

It can be said amongst the different disorders and syndromes, textaphrenia is commonly found amongst teenagers. Whether this disorder has a cure, it is still unknown, but I’m sure it can be prevented by the efforts of the individual itself. We are all text addicts; there is no doubt in it. It’s not only the youngsters that are text addicts, but the adults are also heavily text addicts these days. Now the adults can’t even prevent the teenagers from using cell phones. Thus this device has become a requisite for all of us, more than a luxury.