Without the brilliant ideas of people who made the innovations of technology possible, the modern community will not be the same as today. Nowadays, people live in a society where using mobile phones is part of a daily life. These devices can help each person to communicate with another person to make their life easier. However, during the 1980s on Twenge’s middle school days, she enjoyed a “parent-free hours shopping” with her friends.
Twenge also described how teens were likely to be in her generation and teens in today’s generation called iGen, people who were born between 1995 and 2012.
According to her, iGen can spend their whole day talking on Snapchat, a social media that use to send pictures or videos with each other, while she might have “spent an evening tying up” with her family. There would have been a big difference between the teens who live in a society where there were no smartphones and teens who are now living in a society with these modern technologies.
A Smartphone is a modern kind of mobile phones and part of modern technology that people encounter. These devices were first introduced in 2007. Based on Romeo Vitelli, “Smartphones became widely available beginning in 2007 with most Americans owning one by the end of 2012.” With these smartphones, teens were more likely to be addicted because of its different features. Internet, one of the contributing factor why teens use smartphones because it can easily help them to research different things and to have an access on social media.
The normal usage of smartphones can lead to addiction. As explained by Maria Cohut, the “smartphone and Internet use impacted the performance of daily activities” including sleep and mental health. Broadly speaking, affected mental health is caused by the chemical imbalances in the brain due to the smartphones. As written on one of the articles posted on Medical News Today, “Dr. Seo explains that ratios of GABA (Gamma-Aminobutyric acid) and Glx (Glutamate-Glutamine) to creatine are significantly linked to the mobile phone addiction.” GABA is an inhibitory neurotransmitter in the nervous system while Glx is an excitatory neurotransmitter that speeds up electric signaling in the brain. Cohut clarifies that the imbalances between the two levels have “previously been found to play a role in mood disorders” which is a basically part of a teen’s mental health.
Mobile phone addiction may not only apply to the most common impacted aspect of mental health called depression. Other mental health issues were also revealed such as “poor academic performance, irritability, and poor decision-making skills” (Netsanity.net). These other issues were considered to be in an emotional or behavioral state corresponding to a mental health issue. Too much usage of mobile phones or mobile phone addiction is a major contributing factor to a mental health issue or problem among teenagers.
Teenagers in the current society use smartphones to text, chat, or call their friends anytime. With this, some of them would rather prefer not to hangout or go with their friends because of the modern communication linked. According to Twenge, more than 40 percent were dropped by “the number of teens who get together with their friends nearly every day by 2000 to 2015.” Obviously, it is expected to happen as the smartphones were introduced in 2007. Twenge also revealed that the supposed to be hanging out or bonding time with friends were now replaced by “virtual spaces accessed through apps and the web”.
If this kind of situation is going to continue, the society and real meaning of “friends” will never be the same as before, particularly 1980s. Teenagers would rather stay at home using and talking to their online friends than to hangout and get together without the mobile phone use. According to a Pew Research Center survey in 2014-2015 written on Medical News Today article, “73 percent of teens have access to a smartphone”.
This statistical status had increase by 22 percent on the survey conducted in March 7-April 2018. Monica Anderson and Jingjing Jiang reports, “95 percent of teens now say the have or have access to a smartphone” particularly because of the Internet that represents the “45 percent of teens”. Additionally, the percentage of teens who use the Internet constantly “has nearly doubled from the 24 percent” in 2014-2015 survey. Anderson and Jiang also point out that social media use among teenagers “could lead to psychological issues or drama.”
Teen depression and suicide have been growing since 2011. In October, Time reported that teenagers who experienced depression and suicide have “leapt by 60%” between 2010 and 2016. Relatively speaking, Chalos stated that “from 2012 to 2015, depression in boys increased by 21 percent, while girls’ increased by 50 percent.” Teenage girls during this year were more likely to be affected by the rates of depression. Spending more time online or mobile phone use affects mental health of a teenager leading to depression. As written on netsanity.net, “people who are depressed spend more time online”. It is because of the relief they get from the Internet and social media use which allow them to express on what they are feeling.
Chalos explains, “As teens have started spending less time together, they have become less likely to kill others, but more likely to kill themselves.” According to The Guardian, “Not only did smartphone use and depression increase in tandem, but time spent online was linked to mental health issues across two different data sets. We found that teens who spent five or more hours a day online were 71% more likely than those who spent less than an hour a day to have at least one suicide risk factor (depression, thinking about suicide, making a suicide plan or attempting suicide). Overall, suicide risk factors rose significantly after two or more hours a day of time online.”Mobile phone addiction is associated with other mental health problems.
Anxiety, irritability, poor decision-making skills, and sleeping disturbances were some of the other issues linked in excessive use of mobile phones. Babadi-Akashe et al. emphasized that the “emotional attachment to mobile phones for their users is in a way that makes them believe they cannot live without a cell phone.” Teens are being dependent on their mobile phones that technically affects their mental health such as “destroying their sleep” (Leslie). Babadi-Akashe et al. added that people who use mobile phones excessively are also those people who have “low self-esteem and poor social relationships.” They would rather choose to face the screens on their phones than to talk with real people outside the world of technology. With this, the technology use “can lead to social anxiety and sleep disorders (Babadi-Akashe et al.).”
A normal teenager would usually gain more than seven hours of sleep a night. Unfortunately, due to the smartphones, many teens were struggling to sleep because of too much using of these gadgets. Twenge interprets that “fifty-seven percent more teens were sleep deprived in 2015 than in 1991.” Theoretically speaking, 2015 belongs to the year when the technologies and smartphones were present. Additionally, Twenge states that in just four years, “from 2012 to 2015, 22 percent more teens failed to get seven hours of sleep.” Sleeping is one of the important key to gain healthy mental health of a teenager. However, not getting enough sleep for a teenager “can lead to forgetfulness, difficulty concentrating, lowered alertness, poor reasoning skills and impaired judgment, health problems like diabetes and high blood pressure, weight gain, and, of course, depression. (netsanity.net).”
As the number of teens who were addicted on mobile phones continually increasing, then, the rates of teenagers that suffer to mental health problems will also increase. Teenagers are already on the stage that they can decide to themselves. Likewise, if they choose not to overuse their phones, the tendency of being a mobile phone addiction to a teen will reduce. In Walton’s view, teenagers who spend more time on the real world rather than the world of smartphones and technology “had a lower risk for both depression and suicide.” These things include “doing sports, homework, socializing with friends in real life, and going to church (Walton).”
Parents can also help their children to develop and improve their mental health. For instance, Twenge points out some things to help the teens protect their mental health by boosting self-esteem, managing stress, promoting a healthy lifestyle, and limiting the screen time. Basically, teenagers spend more time on schools than on their homes. In this kind of manner, schools and universities institutions can create “recreational programs for students’ leisure time to maintain students’ mental health (Babadi-Akashe et al.).” It is their responsibility to help their students not to have mental health issues despite of overusing and addiction to their smartphones or mobile phones.
Conclusion
The relationship between mobile phones and mental health among teenagers has logically impacted the generation. Correspondingly, teenagers would become more dependent on using their mobile phones. They found happiness and relief to talk to the people who are on the screens through social media. One thing teens do not realize in this kind of situation is they are going to be considered mobile phones addict. In particular, teens could not live without their phones which is a factor of this kind of addiction.
The mobile phone addiction and mental health problems may not only affect to the current generation, but as well as the future generations and future events to happen. Society will never be the same as before as the population of people that are suffering from depression, stress, suicide and other mental health issues were increasing. Likewise, social relations will reduce while mental health issues will increase. Hence, it is necessary for the parents to guide and monitor their children in using mobile phones.
Encourage them to be not dependent on mobile phones and explain the negative effects it may bring to their mental health. Despite benefits that teenagers can get from using of mobile phones, it still does not mean anything if only their mental health is going be at risk. There are many factors that include in mental health issues which are the effects of mobile phone addiction. As the research has demonstrated the relationship between mobile phone addiction and mental health among teenagers, it is clearly to agree that technology is bringing a big impact on teenagers as well as these devices should help them to be more responsible in many aspects of life specifically mental health.
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