The Dark Side Of iPads Coming To Light

Electronics cause unexpected problems in toddlers, adults

An alarming trend is coming to light as psychologists and counselors see more and more young people addicted to the Internet and portable electronic devices.

The “floodgates of desperate youngsters” opened in 2010, said child psychotherapist Julie Lynn Evans in an interview with Britain’s Telegraph. “I saw my work increase by a mad amount and so did others I work with. Suddenly everything got much more dangerous, much more immediate, much more painful.”

Official figures confirm the picture she paints, with emergency admissions to child psychiatric wards doubling in four years, and those young adults hospitalized for self-harm up by 70 percent in a decade.

“Something is clearly happening,” says Evans, “because I am seeing the evidence in the numbers of depressive, anorexic, cutting children who come to see me. And it always has something to do with the computer, the Internet and the smartphone.”

Hard on the heels of Evans’ interview comes the story of a 12-year-old Colorado girl who twice tried to poison her mother with bleach after her mother took away the girl’s iPhone. The preteen was detained at the Boulder County Juvenile Center on two counts of attempted first-degree murder.

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