07 August,2014 03:16 PM IST | | IANS
If you have a tendency to read and post tweets for several hours a day, watch out for psychiatric disorders
London: If you have a tendency to read and post tweets for several hours a day, watch out for psychiatric disorders.
According to researchers, an overdose of Twitter may drive you psychotic.
The study detailed the case of Mrs C - a 31-year-old heavy Twitter user - who was admitted to a psychiatric hospital in Germany because of intensive suicidal thoughts.
Mrs C's development of psychotic symptoms coincided with her "excessive" use of Twitter - up to several hours a day reading and posting tweets, claimed the paper titled "Twitter Psychosis: A Rare Variation or a Distinct Syndrome?".
According to the paper, "the first symptoms were that she believed a 'famous actor' was responding to her tweets through symbols in his messages or through retweets by others".
The woman later recovered and lost interest in Twitter.
If we believe experts, Twitter psychosis does not appear to be "real" at this point.
"This is a single case which we presented to the medical community to discuss with colleagues if they have made similar experiences," Jan Kalbitzer of Charite-Universitatsmedizin, Berlin, was quoted as saying in NBC News.
The paper appeared in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease
