In 2014, Mahesh was an average techie living in Bengaluru. He had been married for two years and was leading a normal life with his wife. He even had a 7-month-old baby. But he had one problem – the habit of watching porn excessively. For a few months, he was not able to give enough time to his wife and newly born, leading to conflicts in the family. Despite a healthy sex-life with his wife, he was not able to control his urge to watch porn.

Later that year when things came to a flashpoint, Mahesh started asking himself, was he addicted to porn? Was it a medical, or a psychological problem? That’s when he decided to visit the Service for Healthy Use of Technology (SHUT) clinic at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS) in Bengaluru.

That was the first case in which the patient himself came to us to get himself ‘treated’ for this problem.

— Dr Manoj Kumar Sharma, Additional Professor at SHUT

The SHUT clinic was an idea born out of a study on behavioural addiction in Bengaluru, funded by the Indian Council for Medical Research. Dr Sharma and three other doctors were a part of the study, and it is during that study that the idea emerged that a clinic like SHUT, which exclusively deals with addiction to technology, was required.

“Through the study, we found out that 4-7 % of the respondents were behavioural addicts to technology related activities like watching porn, gambling, shopping and many more” says Dr Sharma, who has been one of the primary innovators of SHUT clinic which deals with addiction to technology. After the ICMR study was completed, Dr Sharma and his colleagues proposed the idea to NIMHANS and SHUT was thrown open in August 2014.

In the past one year, Dr Sharma has attended to over 60 cases of technology addiction, of which 7 involved porn addicts or those at the risk of becoming one. And as the word spreads about the clinic, they are getting more cases of technological behavioural addiction, including addiction to porn.

Dr Sharma says that almost all his patients belonged to the middle or higher socio-economic strata and in most cases the patient was the parent’s only child.