Social networking and psychological disorders

BANGALORE: With the generation X setting a revolution in Internet and discarding of story books, came in a new bug called “social networking”. While merits of such websites can obviously span from increased social touch points, dissolving of geographical boundaries and winning back old friends but of course such a boon never came without a bane. With explosion of social networking sites in the past decade, more and more people started having an alternate virtual life too co-existing with their real being. However experts maintain that the daily overuse of media and technology  lead to psychological disorders among them and many of them are unaware of the dangers of exposing of themselves to strangers on these sites. “Rather than interacting socially in the real life, people spend all the time online.  Instead of one to one connection, these social networking sites are disconnecting people, making them more isolated and disabling them to learn new strategies. Not just this, using several sites have also lead to reduction in functioning at work, family and academics and resulting in stress as well as making them more susceptible to future health problems. With hours of sedentary lifestyle, people start munching on snacks and consume excessive  fizzy drinks, alcohol coffee and tea'', says Dr Roshan R Jain, senior consultant psychiatry,  Apollo Hospital.To tackle the situation of extreme isolation from all social activities in a society, he further says ,  ''E- Fast is also one of  the method of limiting the use of social sites wherein once in a week, one needs to shut down the mobile phones or i pad or smart phones. More than displaying  pictures and posting messages, people should also need to know the how to limit the use of these electronic media.” He also says, people who are frequent on social networking sites shows a tremendous amount of narcissistic behavior. Even the studies suggests that they show more signs of other psychological disorders including antisocial behaviors, mania and aggressive tendencies.Dr BN Gangadhar, professor of psychiatry, NIMHANS says, when a person loose face to face contact and spend maximum time on these sites, he tend to slowly loose the sensitivity to appreciate the emotion of the other person, which is a potential rick attached to the daily overuse of media and technology.