Cell phone addiction and its impact on students’ mental health

BACKGROUND: Stress, anxiety and depression increased during the confinement by COVID-19 and the mobile phone was a tool used for various school and communication functions in a necessary way, however, these mental health problems continue today as well as the way in which our mobiles are used. Objective: to determine the association between cell phone addiction and students’ mental health. METHODS: A cross-sectional, observational, prospective and analytical study was carried out between November and April 2023. Students between the ages of 15 and 26 were included; Subjects with a diagnosis of stress, anxiety, depression or with treatment for these diseases were excluded. Data collection was carried out using Google Forms, applying the DASS-21 test for stress, anxiety and depression (A.Cronbach 0.9) and the EDAS-18 cell phone addiction test (A.Cronbach 0.74). The SPSS v22 program was used, X2 test, Odds Ratio (OR) and confidence interval (CI95%). RESULTS: 1377 students were included, with an average age of 19.2(±2.1) years, with an average use of the telephone of 8.5(±4.5) hours a day, with a prevalence of depression of 51.3%, anxiety of 59.0% and stress of 46.3%.. Cell phone addiction is associated (OR/CI95%) with stress (3.5/2.7-4.6), anxiety (3.0/2.2-4.0) and depression (3.0/2.2-0.9) and with stress, anxiety and depression severe at the same time (6.9/4.5-10.8), while proper use is associated with being without any of these 3 pathologies (3.2/2.5-4.2). The use of the telephone to view social networks is associated with depression (1.5/1.0-2.2), the same as its use for games (0.6/0.5-0.8) and multimedia (0.6/0.5-0.8) (p < 0.05). CONCLUSIONS: The cell phone is a tool that is associated with the mental health of young people, however, it has the duality of favoring it with proper use, recreationally or harming it when addicted to the device, causing inappropriate use of the device. itself or, to facilitate unfavorable activities for the user. KEY MESSAGES: • The cell phone can lead to mental health problems, so we must educate the population about its correct use and the problems caused by its inappropriate use. • The use of the cell phone could serve as an element that helps promote mental health, so it would be worth doing studies using it as a supervised therapeutic measure.