Textaphrenia, textiety, are just a few disorders text addicts suffer

Melbourne, June 30 : A study has revealed that Australian teenagers who are 'text addicts' are suffering from a range of serious mental and physical disorders.

The study into youth communication habits identified the risks teens face from texting excessively every day, and the symptoms included anxiety, insecurity, depression, low self-esteem and "repetitive thumb syndrome".

According to figures released by Boost Mobile, a reseller of the Optus network, text messaging has increased by 89 percent in the last two years.

Jennie Carroll, a technology researcher from RMIT University in Melbourne, has studied of the effects of modern communication since 2001 and said the mobile phone had become meshed into teenagers' lives.

Her study identified four distinct disorders - textaphrenia, textiety, post-traumatic text disorder and binge texting.

Textaphrenia is thinking a message had arrived when it hadn't, while textiety is the anxious feeling of not receiving or sending text messages.

"With textaphrenia and textiety there's a feeling no one loves me, no one's contacted me," the Daily Telegraph quoted her as saying.

Post-traumatic stress disorder involved physical and mental injuries from texting, like walking into things while texting and even crossing a road without looking.

"There were reports from Japan of 'repetitive thumb syndrome' and thumbs growing because of texting leading to 'Monster Thumbs'," she revealed.

Binge texting is when teens send multiple texts to feel good about themselves and try to attract responses.

"This is the reverse of the anxiety - you think you've been left out of the loop so you send a lot of texts and wait for responses," Carroll explained.