A three-year-old who learnt Spanish from YouTube but not a word of her mother tongue. A doctor of thirty-five in love with a girlfriend he designed. A woman who went from Candy Crush to fifty lakh rupees in six months.
Two clinicians on what the phone in your palm has done to the Indian mind, and what can be done about it.
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Loneliness drives us to the screen. The screen deepens the loneliness. Every behaviour in this book is a different door into the same room.
Betting apps that took a man's sixty lakh in six months. Pornography and OnlyFans standing in for intimacy. Weekend parties nobody enjoys anymore. AI companions who never argue and never leave. Infinite scroll built on the same psychology as a casino slot machine. Griefbots that will not let a family bury its dead.
Underneath all of it sits a simple biological argument. Dopamine is fast, cheap and endlessly repeatable, and every application on your phone is engineered to deliver it in ten-second bursts. Oxytocin is slow. It needs sustained, unhurried, face-to-face contact, and it is the thing that actually produces trust, belonging and the willingness to put yourself on the line for someone. We have optimised our whole waking life for the first and starved ourselves of the second.
The cases come from the outpatient department of the Central Institute of Psychiatry in Ranchi, and they run the full length of a life: a three-year-old, a five-year-old, teenagers, a couple five years into a sexless marriage, a physician, a retired woman convinced by her feed that she had cancer.
None of them are told to throw the phone away. In almost every case the treatment is the same three unglamorous things: cut the screen, restore the conversation at home, and put one real hobby back into the week.
"Back then, connecting with people used to cost something. It meant something precisely because it cost something."
"You can be a good boyfriend and a great gambler at the same time."
"It was just like Instagram, but without a no-nipple policy."
"In the name of claiming the weekend, you are denouncing yourself."
"Ramesh knew Rosita was not real, but it didn't matter. She was his dream girl."
"In the age of 'You can be anyone,' you are truly objectified; you can be anyone but yourself."
"The sustained gratification-pleasure of a 180-minute film has been shrunk to a 10-second dopamine high."
"We would keep rewarding the dead and discrediting the living."
"AI will not realize how wrong its worldview is; it can only be as good as the information it is raised on."
"Make the extra-curricular curricular."
Not being lonely is like listening to a single melody soulfully. Being lonely is like listening to the noise of hundreds of melodies playing together, making them meaningless.Chapter 5, Loneliness and AI Companions
'Muchas gracias' means 'many thanks'. Had it come from anyone other than a three-year-old with Hindi-speaking parents, it wouldn't have surprised me. But the grace with which the child said it, did surprise and charm me simultaneously. What didn't charm me, though, were the vacant faces of the parents as they were trying to shush the child, embarrassed by the child's Spanish utterance. I thought to myself: I have a situation here at the clinic.
The young couple had come to our outpatient department with worried eyes, concerned faces, and their three-year-old. Both parents were working; the child was mostly under caretaker supervision at home. Their complaint was that the child had not picked up her mother tongue yet, but strangely uttered many Spanish words. The child said it again: 'Muchas gracias!' This time my smile deserted me; I could hardly manage a laboured grin.
The child showed little interest in play or interaction with other children, grew irritated when the phone was taken away, and refused food unless a screen was in front. The parents wanted to know if their child had a mental disorder.
Chapter one, page 13
If you are struggling with your mental health, Tele MANAS is India's national mental health helpline, free and available in multiple languages on 14416.