Awareness, Self-Assessment and Help Seeking Behavior for Behavioral Addictions Related to Use of Mobile Technology Among Attendees of a Health Camp.

Introduction: Behavioral addictions are increasingly being recognized as a major public health problem. While this issue continues to hog the limelight in the media, there is limited scientific research on this theme from India.
Objectives: We aimed at presenting the findings on assessment of the awareness, self-assessment and help seeking behavior for behavioral addictions related to use of mobile technology among attendees of a trade promotion event.
Methods: We report findings from a health camp organized as part of a large trade promotion event in the northern part of India. The trade promotion event was open to the general public. As part of the screening services offered at the health camp, the visitors were offered to screen themselves on the theme of behavioral addictions related to use of mobile technology using a self-administered questionnaire. We carried out a chart review of the data gathered at the health camp.
Results: We assessed records of a total of 817 respondents who completed the screening using the self-administered questionnaire. The mean age of the respondents was 32.35 years (SD ± 13.62). Approximately 56% of the respondents rated themselves to be having at least one of the nine features of behavioral addictions. Around 15% of the respondents endorsed five or more features. Around 41% of the respondents mentioned that they shall agree to the professional help in case they are having behavioral addiction related to use of mobile technology. Fifteen percent of the respondents agreed to have sought some help in the past. The logistic regression analysis revealed that the odds of help seeking increased significantly with every single increase in the number of self-assessed feature of behavioral addiction. © Journal of the Association of Physicians of India 2011.