Exposure to gadgets may cause ‘virtual autism’ among children

RANCHI: Sreyansh, a five year old boy of the city is a restless child. His parents found

Sreyansh

difficult to control when he got upset. Nothing seemed to pacify him other than a cartoon, which Sreyansh’s parents played on their respective smartphones. The couple had no idea that Sreyansh’s excessive exposure to their phones would trigger speech impairment.

Like Sreyansh, three year old Malavika also spent hours peering at the mobile screen and the television. Malavika today faces difficulty in interacting with her mates at the pre-school and as a result usually keeps to herself.

The signs of delay in speech and difficulty in social communication among children have become as a concern among their parents. These, according to citybased psychiatrists are symptoms of virtual autism, a new phenomenon that has been garnering a lot of medical research in European nations and the USA. Psychiatrists in Ranchi are concerned with the growing numbers of such children. According to them, the symptoms are of a mental disorder which is commonly referred to as ‘virtual autism’. Autism is a neuro-developmental disorder which manifests as problem in speech among patients who face difficulties to communicate verbally and non-verbally. According to experts, the disorder usually sets in a person by the age of two due to genetic and environment factors.

Experts in psychiatry associate virtual autism to prolonged exposure of children aged up to four years to mobile, television and computer screens. Its symptoms are delayed speech, difficulty in social interaction and behavioral changes. With the medical community in western world waking up to the new disorder, no survey has been done yet in the state.

As per estimates in several medical journals, autism cases in the US have sharply increased with one in every 68 children showing its symptoms in 2014 in comparison to one in 5,000 children in 1975. Dr. Siddharth Sinha, senior resident at Ranchi Institute of Neuro Psychiatry and Allied Sciences (

Rinpas

), stressed that the disorder needs urgent attention in Jharkhand. “Unknowingly, the parents expose their children for long hours to mobile phones and televisions. They do not give chocolates thinking that it will cause health problems. However, unknowingly, they end up damaging mental health of their child,” he added. “In the TV shows, a child is made to repeat words without knowing what they mean. The child can count, but he does not know what it means. So instead of analyzing, the child simply ends up echoing the question rather than answering when asked,” another city-based psychiatrist said.