Shin (14), a middle school student in Daegu has been addicted to gaming for years. He stayed up all night in his room playing games. He was always late for school, and his friends teased him, calling a “game otaku(maniac)”. Shin blamed himself for being “someone unnecessary.” Late last year, he was diagnosed with severe depression and tried to be admitted to a psychiatric ward at a university hospital, but there were no vacancies, and he was only admitted this month.
“The 30 closed wards at Severance Hospital, which used to house adult schizophrenia patients, are now filled with teens and 20s,” Shin Yee-jin, a professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at Severance Hospital, said on Jan. 29. “Most of them have become so depressed that they have attempted self-harm and suicide.”
The number of teens and 20s suffering from depression, self-harm and other mental illnesses is on the rise. According to the National Health Insurance Corporation, there were 13,303 psychiatric hospitalizations for teens and 20s in 2017, or 14.6% of all patients. But last year, the number rose to 16,819 (22.2%), an increase of nearly 10 percentage points in five years.
I’m fighting a similar parenting battle myself, currently. I’m a sole parent, tho. So I’m just fighting with myself. I’m trying to set limits for my kids, but I’m just not able to enforce them. I have my grandson living with me in kinship care, and he is extremely high needs, my 15yo is high needs, so my 12 yo gets no attention and has slipped into device addiction, I set limits, very minimal limits, mind you, because I’m trying to weeny her down, she still sneaks around them, then I take them away entirely. I took them away for a month, after warning her about 10 times that I would if I caught her again. She was absolutely fine after a week. Maybe make your partner a bet, lol. Is your partner the one at home with them mostly? Or do you both work long hours?
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