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Internet has become an integral part of our life for the past one decade. In India use of internet is massive among students. There is growing concern about whether internet usage is excessive and does it leads to addiction. Furthermore prevalence study of Internet Addiction is need of the hour. The present study is to find out the prevalence of Internet Addiction and its associated depression in college students of Kerala and Tamil Nadu. In this study 200 college students from Kerala and Tamil Nadu were randomly selected. They were assessed for internet addiction and depression using the measures Internet Addiction Test and Beck Depression Inventory. This was a cross sectional study and the analysis include mean, standard deviation, percentage and't'. Results show that 9% of college students of Tamil Nadu and 12% of college students of Kerala have depression associated with internet addiction.
Keywords: internet addiction, depression, college students
Internet has been used for communication, research, entertainment, education, gaming, pornography and business transactions (Kraut et al., 1998; Ley et al., 2014). The internet allows people to establish social connections that cannot be achieved easily in modern urban life, to express their thoughts and feel ings freely without restraint and to exaggerate aspects that the individual wants to feature (Orsal et al., 2013). Other factors that may increase internet use are the availability of the internet, opportunities to access prohibited content and the ability to play games and take risks (Young, 1999; Teo & Lim, 2000; Buckingham, 2002). Healthy use of the internet is defined as the use of the internet to achieve a desired goal within an appropriate period of time without intellectual or behavioral discomfort (Davis, 2001). The term "internet addiction" was proposed by Dr. Ivan Goldberg in 1995 for pathological compulsive internet use (Goldberg, 1996). Internet addiction is generally defined as an uncontrollable desire for excessive use of the internet, devaluation of time spent without connecting to the internet, intense nervousness and aggression in the case of deprivation and progressive deterioration of social and family life (Young, 1999; Young, 2004). Internet addicts give more importance to internet than family, friends and work. They stay online for long hours, prefer to contact people with internet instead of other forms of social contact...