The prevalence of sexting and cyber-bullying among today’s youngsters will lead to an epidemic of depression and anxiety when they grow up, a leading psychiatrist has warned.
Dr Natasha Bijlani, consultant psychiatrist at the Priory Hospital Roehampton, said that teenagers and young adults were already suffering low self-esteem, body image issues and self-harming tendencies because their childhood had been scarred by online and digital abuse.
Some were seeking help while they were still young but they were the “tip of an iceberg”, with many more simply soldiering on, thinking that was how life is nowadays. However, these untreated problems left them vulnerable to serious depression later on.
“Episodes in childhood are often repressed. Children often fear reporting abuse, and only later in life do these issues surface in the form of depression, stress and anxiety and other serious psychological conditions,” Dr Bijlani said. “This relatively new phenomenon of sexting, where explicit texts and Âpictures are sent between smartphone devices, seems to have become endemic, and we are not sure of the long-term consequences.”
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