Everyone is on their phones. But is it really phone addiction we’re experiencing? | Life and style

Phone Addiction - The New Daily Mail Issue

There is no standard diagnosis for ‘phone addiction’, and a debate rages about whether there should be.
With no standard diagnostic criteria, the line between excessive phone use and addiction is blurry.
A recent survey from the Pew Research Center found that 95% of teens had a smartphone.
Almost half of teens reported they were online “almost constantly” from 24% nearly a decade ago.
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In May, the US surgeon general issued an advisory on social media’s harms to youth mental health.
He called for safety standards for tech platforms, similar to those for toys and car seats.
He also called for greater social infrastructure to promote in-person connections, such as parks, libraries and volunteer organizations.
The history of addiction is one of two competing forces – criminalization and medicalization.
On one hand, a diagnosis could legitimize the suffering that some people face and enable treatment.
But on the other, with all the cultural and historical baggage surrounding “addiction”, the label could misrepresent phone overuse as the absence of free will and do more harm than good.
It is unclear if phone use has crossed that critical tipping point into social harm.
We evolved to find social interaction rewarding.
To date, there has been only one longitudinal study about how social media affects brain development.
In the US, opiates and cocaine were first banned in 1914, followed by alcohol between 1920 to 1933.
The National Institute on Drug Abuse had officially rebranded addiction as a “chronic relapsing brain disease” in 1997.
The goal was destigmatization, but it ended up painting the brain as a universal, disembodied organ devoid of social or environmental influences.

Excessive phone use might not change our brains’ structure like alcoholism does but might change how our brains function.
“We evolved to find social interaction rewarding,” said Meshi, and the need to belong is one of the most powerful, universal human drives.
In his own work, Meshi has shown that decision-making is similarly impaired with excessive social media use and drug addiction, and that overusing social media is associated with decreased real-life social support, as well as greater mental illness and social isolation.
But Meshi is quick to note that research into phone and social media Use is in its infancy, with potential harms still poorly understood.
For the everyday person, “addiction” has become something of a metaphor, referring to something they enjoy, do a lot and feel is unhealthy.
For many of these ‘conditions,’ however, there’s none of this catchy new label.
In the case of “phone addiction, however, it feels overly flippant because the term has become a part of everyday discourse.
From Reddit to the halls of Congress, omnipresence, rather than judicial decree, has begun to reify this issue.

In a June Senate health committee hearing on the youth mental health crisis, phones and social media were all anybody could talk about.
Some scientists have sought to legitimize phone addiction by surrounding the phrase with a cast of characters.
For many experts, the overuse of “addiction” isn’t the same value-free proposition.
It risks creating a two-tiered system for patients, similar to how opioid addiction treatments have long been segregated, says a UCLA psychiatrist.
In Massachusetts, for instance, any person with an addiction can be coerced into treatment under the state’s Section 35 law, according to a medical anthropologist.
The well-off will channel their children to bucolic summer detox camps costing up to $11,000 while the marginalized are relegated to underfunded, crowded public clinics, she says.
The aggressive regulation of methadone – with its daily observed dosing and frequent urine checks – simply wouldn't do for the white middle class, she adds.
The idea of technology infiltrating every part of your life and structuring reality is a slippery slope, says Meshi, who is sympathetic to efforts to rein in social media.

Under a label of addiction, excessive phone use could be employed in a similarly dehumanizing logic: “You can’t make the choice to go on your own, so I have to make the decision for you,” said Carroll.
The real problem, Hansen argues, are the social and environmental drivers, from schools cutting arts and physical education programs to tech companies’ increasingly aggressive business schemes.
For these people, a medical diagnosis would probably help, validating their suffering and ensuring they get the care they need.
Despite the risks, there’s real promise in moving beyond a status quo where patients languish alone, says Hansen.
But if society is going to medicalize phone use, Hansen wants to make sure we’re pointing our fingers in the right direction – away from brain disease notions that “people are a slave to their own habits and behaviors” The term ‘addiction’ is critically important since it implies something about causation, and where the solutions ought to begin.
In other words, rather than punting the problem to the healthcare system, Hansen believes that we should be regulating how software is developed and what's permitted to come to market.

"It’s costly, oh my God,” said Jain.
But for the first time in a long time, Jain feels happy.
“A lot of our generation is more connected than ever on social media, but we’re more lonely than ever,’ she said.
"It's such a weird thing," she said of her generation's relationship with social media.
"We’ve got to get over it.