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This page is an AI-assisted Turkish summary of the study presented at the 26th World Congress of Psychiatry. The study belongs to the presenting authors; please refer to the original source when citing it.

The relationship between screen addiction and school refusal: clinical implications

Correlating screen dependency and school refusal:clinical insights

Excessive screen use often shifts from being a symptom of school-related distress to becoming the primary factor maintaining school avoidance.

This presentation aims to describe the clinical intersection of screen addiction and school refusal, outlining behavioral trajectories, shared neurodevelopmental vulnerabilities, and targeted clinical triage. Clinical presentations and management protocols were reviewed to map the functional relationship between problematic screen use and school avoidance behaviors, with a focus on underlying anxiety, family dynamics, and executive dysfunction. The relationship between these two phenomena is largely mediated by avoidance dynamics; highly stimulating digital media serve as a readily accessible means of emotional numbing in response to school-related social or academic anxiety. Over time, this digital cocoon reinforces agoraphobic tendencies and severely disrupts circadian rhythms, making early-morning school routines physically and emotionally unsustainable. Phenotypic differences suggest that young people with neurodevelopmental conditions such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and autism spectrum disorder are particularly vulnerable to this cycle. The authors emphasize that interventions must go beyond simple restrictions; parallel protocols that address the sensory and emotional appeal of screens while systematically rebuilding distress tolerance in the school environment, together with family-centered digital detox programs, are essential components of school reintegration strategies.

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