By Leonard Kamugisha Akida,
KAMPALA
Kenyan advocate for mental and physical health and Advocate for Persons With Disabilities (PWDs), Psychologist Faith Goko Njoki says phubbing someone in favour of your phone is bad for relationships, social connections and mental health.
Phubbing somebody in favour of your phone is bad for relationships, social connections and mental health, Faith Goko Njoki Psychologist @Healingheartske tells @kyambogou stdts to stop paying much attention to their 🤳 whenever with friends but give them company.@AmanyaBelyndah pic.twitter.com/4JzJ9UJTEw
— Parrots UG (@parrotsug) October 11, 2023
She was speaking at the All Schools and Universities Mental Health Awareness Conference held at Kyambogo University on October 10 , when she asked students to stop paying much attention to their mobile phones and other smart gadgets whenever with friends but show them companion. According to her, showing companion for others helps them to open up on their mental problems.
“We are losing people because of not opening up to people and choose to stay on our phones. There is no need of coming to someone’s house you all keep on the phone. It does not make sense at all. You could have stayed home and you just communicate using social media or texts,”
The founder of Healing Hearts Organization, a Kenyan CBO that provides mental health support to Kenyans warned that not attending to people’s mental health problems and waiting to contribute towards their funerals in case of any crises is an act of hypocrisy. She asked people to effectively reach out to support friends and relatives with signs of mental illnesses.
Several studies have shown that mobile phones have made face -to-face conversations meaningless because people no longer pay attention to one another and spend much time on their phones.
The 2017 study by Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University, found teenagers who spent more time on new media were more likely to report mental health issues than those who spent time on non-screen activities.
According to data collected between 2010 and 2015 from more than 500,000 adolescents in the US, children who spent low amounts of time engaged in in-person social interaction, but high amounts of time on social media, were the most likely to be depressed.
Another study by Ofcom reported in 2018, that more than two in five admitted to spending too much time online. Adult users spend an average two hours and 28 minutes a day online on a smartphone, the regulator said. For 18-24 years olds, this increases to three hours and 14 minutes.
But, Nabukenya Maria Assumpta, a counselling psychologist, addiction and trauma therapist and founder Judith pillars counselling consultancy in Mbarara says phone communication is a convenient and inevitable means today and warns of harmful mental effects this may cause.
“Humans are wired to connect physically for survival. Developing a dependency relationship with objects, disconnects us from true meaning, isolates us, stifles our emotional growth it’s an open door and a fertile ground for not only cyber addictions but other compulsive behaviors as well,” she says.
Dr Rachel Grieve, a senior lecturer in psychology at the University of Tasmania, says in some cases communicating online helps people overcome feelings of social isolation.
“If people are using their smartphones to chat via apps such as Facebook, then that is a means to enhance their social capital and social connectedness. So, that means smartphones could serve as a buffer to loneliness, rather than causing feelings of isolation,” she says.
In an interview with the Irish Independent in 2018, Dr. Orlando of Western Sydney University said conversation is shifting to take into account the various ways of advanced technology.
“If we think about it, conversation has changed a lot over the years. We are now finding value in communicating via video and images – take the massive appeal of Snapchat and Instagram. Often these images are then used as talking points when we see each other face-to-face.”
In a similar interview, Dr Michael Carr-Gregg, a leading psychologist and author, disagreed and blamed some parents, who are spending “way too much time” on smartphones.
“I really don’t think this is a moral panic, as some people are saying, I think this is legitimate,” he said.
“When you are growing up, nothing lights up the child’s brain like one-on-one three dimensional play with a loving adult. And what worries me is that with so many kids now, you see them in restaurants and they’re basically just given a mobile to shut them up. There’s no interaction, they’re not learning delayed gratification, no manners, and learning just to be alone… and you wonder what that’s going to mean for these kids when they grow up.
“Will they have the ability to sit quietly, will they have the ability to carry on a conversation with someone, particularly as they never see their parents doing it?”
