New Delhi (Sputnik) — The All-India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) has officially confirmed selfie-mania as a mental disorder by acknowledging that at least three patients are undergoing treatment at psychiatric facilities for being overly obsessed with taking pictures of themselves and uploading them to social networking sites.
Ajoy Sehgal, spokesperson at Delhi's Ganga Ram Hospital confirmed to Sputnik that the number of footfalls at the hospital's psychiatry ward have increased manifold.
There has been an alarming increase in patients referred for treatment or counseling for 'body dysmorphic disorder' – a mental disorder characterized by an obsessive preoccupation with perceived flaws in one's own appearance and undertaking exceptional measures to hide or fix it. It is often found that the disorder is triggered by depression because the persons based their self-esteem on comments or likes on a picture they have uploaded to social networking sites like Facebook and Instagram.
India has registered the highest number of "selfiecides" – accidental deaths that occur during the course of taking a photograph of oneself. Out of the total 127 recorded "selfiecides" in 2016, 76 occurred in India, according to a study published by US-based Carnegie Mellon University and Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, Delhi.
