If you have seen any teenagers recently, it’s odds-on they’ll have had a phone in their hand. Amid rising concerns about children’s phone use, Spain recently announced plans for doctors to screen children for smartphone addiction and there have been calls in the UK for complete bans on phones in schools. Earlier this week, UK scientists said their work helped support the idea that some teens could be addicted to their phones – but not all researchers agree.
So is it really helpful to consider kids who seem glued to their screens as having an addiction ? One problem in this debate is that there is no universally agreed definition of what it means to be addicted to anything – even when people are taking drugs like heroin or cocaine. “Addiction is not something that you can measure with a blood test. It is a concept that we as researchers develop,” said psychologist Dr Margarita Panayiotou at the University of Manchester.
The picture is murkier still when it comes to “behavioural” addictions, but most medical bodies recognise at least two such disorders – addiction to gambling, and to video gaming. When assessing if someone might have such an addiction, doctors use questionnaires that weigh up factors like how much time someone spends on the activity, if it is displacing other beneficial pastimes, and if people want to stop but cannot. Scientists are still debating if phone addiction should join the short list of behavioural addictions in the medical textbook.