A teenage girl in northern Vietnam has been hospitalized for depression brought on by her addiction to Facebook, the social media network a former executive has claimed to be “ripping apart the social fabric of how society works.”

According to To Thanh Phuong, deputy director of the National Hospital of Psychiatrics I in Hanoi, the 17-year-old patient was admitted for over a month after she became depressed because of an addiction to Facebook.

Prior to her hospitalization, the girl had become bored with school, suffered from an eating disorder, and refused to engage in any real-life interactions, be it with her family members or friends.

She would spend days locked away alone in her room to browse Facebook on her smartphone, and would throw a violent tantrum any time she was separated from her device.

Her parents were clueless as to how many hours she would spend per day on the social media site, Phuong said, and the girl would stay up all night using her smartphone without her parents’ knowledge.

“Her addiction has improved since undergoing psychiatric treatment at the hospital. She is no longer grumpy without her smartphone,” Phuong said.

According to the health expert, depression caused by overexposure to smartphones and social media platforms such as Facebook has become a rising health concern among Vietnamese youth in recent years.

Young patients are being regularly admitted to the National Hospital of Psychiatrics I with symptoms of video game and social media addiction, Phuong said.

“Many families now allow their children to use smartphones from a very early age but pay no attention to the extent of their use, despite young children not being equipped with the skills to manage their own timetable,” Phuong explained.

Chamath Palihapitiya, formerly vice-president for user growth at Facebook before leaving the company in 2011, said at a Stanford Business School event in November 2017 he felt “tremendous guilt” over his work on “tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works,” The Guardian reported.

“The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works… this is a global problem. It is eroding the core foundation of how people behave by and between each other,” the former Facebook executive was quoted as saying.

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