Getting help for phone or gaming addiction in India

Tele-MANAS is the Union health ministry’s tele-mental-health service. It is toll-free, available around the clock, and reached on 14416 or 1-800-891-4416. Calls are answered in a range of Indian languages, and there is no fee and no referral needed.

It is a general mental-health line rather than a phone-use one, so it is the right first call when the problem is distress, low mood, sleep, or a young person you are frightened for — and the right call at 2 a.m., when nothing else is open. The Economic Survey 2025-26 records over 32 lakh calls since the service launched.

SHUT stands for Service for Healthy Use of Technology. It runs out of the NIMHANS Centre for Well Being in BTM Layout, Bengaluru, and it is the service in India most specifically about this problem: the Economic Survey 2025-26 describes it as providing “specialised care for excessive and compulsive technology use, focusing on adolescents and young adults”. NIMHANS also runs free online sessions for parents.

Appointments are through the Centre for Well Being on 080 2668 5948, or by email at nimhans.wellbeing@gmail.com. It is a hospital service, so expect an assessment rather than an instant answer — and it is worth the call even from outside Karnataka, because they can say what kind of help to look for closer to home.

Kerala Police run Digital De-Addiction (D-DAD) centres offering free counselling for children whose phone, game or social-media use has got out of hand. A parent or a school can make contact directly, on 9497 900 200 or at digitalsafetykerala@gmail.com.

Both come from the force’s own notice. We have left out the founding date and the number of children helped that circulate in news coverage: the reports contradict each other, and a number nobody official publishes is not a number worth repeating to a parent deciding whether to ring.

Not as such. The World Health Organization’s ICD-11 includes gaming disorder — a pattern of gaming that the person has lost control of, that takes precedence over other interests and daily life, and that continues despite harm, normally over at least twelve months. There is no equivalent classification for smartphone or social-media use.

That distinction matters in both directions. It means a teenager who is on Instagram for four hours is not thereby ill, and a shop selling a cure is overreaching. It also means that when gaming really has taken over someone’s life, that is a recognised clinical problem with people trained to treat it — and the number to ring is above, not a gadget to buy.

Spark is for the ordinary version of this: you meant to study, the phone won, and the undo is one tap away. It locks the apps you choose and puts the unlock on a physical key you leave in another room, so getting them back costs a walk instead of a thought. Calls always get through.

What it cannot do is treat anything. It will not help someone who is depressed, frightened or gambling money they do not have, and a person in that position who buys a key instead of ringing 14416 has been failed by the page that sold it to them. If you are not sure which of the two you are reading about, ring the helpline first; it is free, and the key will still be here afterwards.

For parents weighing this up, what a key can and cannot do is the longer version, including why Spark is deliberately not parental-control software.