Grief and Addiction

To main characteristics of my main character, Alice, are her grief about her late boyfriend and phone addiction to the app. To better develop her character, I have to understand both the signs and behaviors associated with both grief and addiction.

Grief

Psychology Today notes that the symptoms of grief are similar to that of depression: sadness, loss of capacity for pleasure, insomnia, loss of interest in eating or taking care of oneself. However, the symptoms of grief lessen over time, unlike depression.

"The acute pain that accompanies loss"

While there is no formula for how grief goes, experiences usually go through the traditional five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. In Alice's case, she experiences prolonged grief, specifically prolonged in the denial and anger stages. Prolonged grief, in general, often leads to isolation and chronic loneliness, another aspect of her grief. She goes through bargaining when she begs her parents for her phone back, and depression when she decides to kill herself. She never reaches acceptance.

Addiction

In general, addiction can be applied to gambling, alcohol, drugs, sometimes even sex, and more recently, to smartphones. The American Psychiatric Association defines addiction in general as:

"a complex condition, a brain disease that is manifested by compulsive substance use despite harmful consequence."

Addiction is the severe substance use disorder in which people have an intense focus on using a certain substance, or more than one substance, to the point that it takes over their life. The symptoms are divided into four categories: impaired control (desire to use and/or failure to cut down usage), social problems (failure to complete major tasks and/or giving up activities for substance abuse), risky abuse (substance use in risky settings), and drug effects (higher tolerances and withdrawal symptoms).

Recently, MIT conducted a study in which students of two professors were required to give up their phones for a day as part of the course. Most students experienced some sort of anxiety, and another study using a similar method found withdrawal symptoms in those without their phones. The second study reported increased heart rate and blood pressure, and a sense of loss of their extended self, being their phones. Another study put teens through cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) for their addiction, and found that their brain chemistry changed and resembled the brains of those without addiction. While these studies are still recent, as is the idea of phone addiction, studies prove that phone addiction resembles characteristics of substance addiction, and that it is on the rise in recent generations.

As the film takes place in the near future, a teenager developing phone addiction, when combined with the predisposition of grief, is not improbable. Aside from her grief symptoms, her addiction symptoms will be introduced in the opening, but elaborated mostly during the falling action when Alice runs away and tries to replicate her "Jacob" on another phone.

Citations:

Walton, Alice G. “Phone Addiction Is Real -- And So Are Its Mental Health Risks.” Forbes, Forbes Magazine, 27 Jan. 2018, www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2017/12/11/phone-addiction-is-real-and-so-are-its-mental-health-risks/#119e49a113df.