They took away his smartphone, 15-year-old in hospital for withdrawal

He ended up in the emergency room in a state of severe psychomotor agitation after his parents took away his cell phone. It happened to a fifteen-year-old taken to the San Luigi hospital in Orbassano, in the Turin area, and treated with intramuscular and intravenous anxiolytic therapies. Professor Gianluca Rosso, a surgeon, psychiatrist and professor of psychiatry at the University of Turin, who was on duty when the boy arrived at the admissions ward, told the Corriere di Torino in an interview. "When he arrived at the emergency room, he had exactly the same symptoms as a person in withdrawal from substances. Too bad that what he was psychotropically lacking was his smartphone," Rosso explains. The young man apparently went into a rage after his parents, exasperated by his constant use of the phone, decided to take it away from him. "A gesture that triggered a reaction in him that was, in fact, similar to that of any drug addict in deprivation," the doctor continues. According to Rosso, "the use of the smartphone creates a bond with the object very similar to that obtained from other substances of abuse such as alcohol, cigarettes and narcotics. They all lead to a continuous stimulation of the dopaminergic system, to which the brain gets used and then feels the need for it". The boy, once the crisis was over, was sent home. "We can indicate hospitalization only for psychiatric conditions associated with addictions - concludes Rosso -. Not for the addiction itself, which is instead taken care of by the Serd, the public services for pathological addictions".

The case dates back two years. It was told, on the sidelines of a debate in Turin in recent days, by Professor Gianluca Rosso, a surgeon specializing in psychiatry and associate professor of psychiatry at the Department of Neurosciences of the University of Turin, who was working at San Luigi at the time of the episode. The teenager was treated as in a classic withdrawal crisis from substances: with large doses of anxiolytics, administered both intramuscularly and intravenously. Once the crisis was over, he was discharged and sent home. According to Rosso, his parents, exasperated by the obsessive use of his cell phone, had decided to take it away from him. The deprivation had triggered a real withdrawal reaction in the boy.