This institution in Brazil helps people with cell phone addiction

We all have that one friend who is a cell phone addict. For them, the mobile phone is just an extension of their hands, and some of them even use it as a way to ignore people in the real world. And sometimes, the addiction becomes so severe that it put their studies, jobs, even their personal relationships at stake. This is the high time they need to get rid of that cell phone addiction.

Welcome to Instituto Delete

To help those cell phone addicts, there is now a clinic in Brazil. Named Instituto Delete, this clinic aims to treat people who are extremely addicted to cell phones and internet. Established in the psychology department at the Universidad Federal de Rio de Janeiro by psychologist Anna Lucia King in 2013, this clinic has already treated 800 patients with this addiction, which is often referred to as nomophobia.

What is nomophobia?

Derived from the term “no-mobile-phone phobia,” this neologism describes an illogical fear of not having access to a cellular connection. This word may not have been listed yet as an official addiction by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, but you can easily see its effect on people, particularly the young generation.

What service you can get there

Once patients arrive at Instituto Delete, a professional will evaluate them to determine the type of their addiction and if they have any social phobias, anxieties or obsessive-compulsive disorder. Considering the type and level of addiction they have, the patients will be then divided into three groups to get personalized treatment.

Image Credit: Instituto Delete

To know about patients’ experience and the effectiveness of the treatment they are getting in the hospital, there will be a meeting every week. The patients will try out different types of exercise there, such as reading a book or watching a movie without looking at the mobile.

Training will be given to let them learn new tricks to avoid excessive use of the phone. If required, some of them will be prescribed medication as well.

If you think overusing of the cell phone is only a psychological problem, you are wrong. Looking down at the cell phone for a long time can develop neck problems for some people, which need special treatment.

Although Brazil is home to the fourth largest number of internet users in the world, Instituto Delete is the first of its kind in this region. In the United States, there are already different kinds of programs to help people with this type of addictions, such as reSTART and Caron Treatment Centers. You may wonder why it is so important to treat people with cell phone addiction, but where 77 percent of Americans have smartphones and waste an average of nearly 3 hours on them each and every day, this issue should not be something that can be ignored.

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Originally published at thetechnews.com on November 19, 2017.