CHENNAI: Forced to stay indoors, people of all age-groups have been spending significantly more hours online and in front of screens, leading to a rise in cyber-space-related psychological issues too. Experts now raise a grave concern on how the lack of awareness on this matter will affect those in distress.
Cyber psychology is a study of how the human mind and behaviour changes, when introduced to technology. Psychiatrist Karthik Rao says, “Internet addiction has increased significantly owing to the lockdown, while cyberspace interactions is affecting human behaviour and social relationships.” Psychiatrists opine that even older people are distressed over issues such as cyber-bullying, cyber-stalking, social media addiction, porn, dark web, and excessive gaming and online shopping.
“We have seen incidence of children committing suicide after losing online games, and couples getting divorced over excessive use of social media. To keep a check on such incidents, it is very important to create awareness on the issue and conduct strategic counselling for the victims. If issues are not addressed at the right time, it could lead to depression, and suicidal or criminal tendencies,” says J Bijaya Shankar, another psychiatrist.
Macans Technologies, a cyber security and solutions specialised company, has chalked out several special programmes to educate people on cyber crimes and cyber psychology issues. The company will organise a five-day webinar on the topic “Value Addition on Emerging Information Technologies” for students and academic faculty of Dr MGR Educational & Research Institute University in Chennai from June 14.
“We need to ensure that parents and teachers don’t panic when this comes to their notice. We need to address these problems through counselling at the early stage itself. Macans Digital Detox is a programme designed to address this,” said Sridevi Shetty, co-founder and director of the firm.