MELBOURNE: Ever heard of textaphrenia,
textiety or post-traumatic text disorder? These are some of serious mental and
physical disorders that teenaged Australian "text addicts" are suffering from, a
new study has revealed.
The research into youth communication habits
identified the risks teens face from texting excessively every day, and the
symptoms included anxiety, insecurity, depression, low self-esteem and
"repetitive thumb syndrome".
According to figures released by Boost
Mobile, a reseller of the Optus network, text messaging has increased by 89% in
the last two years.
Jennie Carroll, a technology researcher from
RMIT University in Melbourne, has studied of the effects of modern communication
since 2001 and said the mobile phone had become meshed into teenagers' lives.
Her study identified four distinct disorders — textaphrenia,
textiety, post-traumatic text disorder and binge texting.
Textaphrenia is thinking a message had arrived when it hadn't, while
textiety is the anxious feeling of not receiving or sending text messages.
"With textaphrenia and textiety there's a feeling no one loves me,
no one's contacted me," the Daily Telegraph quoted her as saying.
Post-traumatic stress disorder involved physical and mental injuries
from texting, like walking into things while texting and even crossing a road
without looking. "There were reports from Japan of 'repetitive thumb syndrome'
and thumbs growing because of texting leading to 'Monster Thumbs'," she
revealed.
Binge texting is when teens send multiple texts to feel
good about themselves and try to attract responses.
"This is the
reverse of the anxiety — you think you've been left out of the loop so you
send a lot of texts and wait for responses," Carroll explained.
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