Page 6 - Screen Addiction: A Teen Epidemic

public health, estimates that 3 to 4 percent of gamers worldwide
are addicted to playing video games, including 5 million in the
United States alone. And a study by researchers at the University
of Michigan–Flint found that 6 percent of social media users—
about 9 million Americans—are addicted to social media.

Toward Screen Addiction
The types of addictions described by Oxford University, the
WHO, and the University of Michigan–Flint—often grouped to-
gether with video and movie watching under the umbrella term
screen addiction—are known as behavioral addictions. A behav-
ioral addiction is a mental health condition in which an individual
engages in a particular behavior and is unable to stop engaging
in it, even if the behavior causes the person harm.
The key components of behavioral addiction have been de-
scribed by Mark D. Griffi ths, a professor at Nottingham Trent Uni-

Many teens spend hours in front of laptops
and other devices every day. Researchers
have found that during the COVID-19
pandemic, teenage screen time for non-
school-related purposes more than doubled.