April 10, 2019 -- “Dawn” was always a sweet, shy child who didn’t mind playing alone and could easily get lost in her books and TV shows, says her mother, “Melissa.”

As a teen, her love of Veggie Tales and Curious George gave way to more grown-up fantasy books, along with shows and movies with a darker edge, like Harry Potter, Supernatural, Riverdale, 13 Reasons Why, Hunger Games, Girl, Interrupted, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, and the young adult horror novel series Asylum. When making friends became a challenge after a move to a new state, Melissa says, screens and the digitized worlds they offer became even more of an escape.

“She was trying to figure out her identity and copying all these characters she would see,” Melissa says. “We now know that she was having nightmares about murder, suicide, and other gruesome, gory, and even demonic things she saw in the storylines, too.”

Melissa says it became difficult and then almost impossible to keep Dawn away from screens. She’d sneak them to school or into her bedroom at night. They had epic battles as Melissa and her husband tried to enforce limits and encourage their daughter to do school and family activities. Melissa says her daughter became defiant, belligerent, and eventually started hurting herself -- cutting her wrists with a razor and concealing it with long sleeves. When her parents discovered the marks on her arm, they rushed her to the ER.

Doctors there referred the family to a counselor who diagnosed Dawn with depression, started her on an antidepressant, and recommended nearly 2 weeks of inpatient treatment for self-harm at a local mental health facility. Meanwhile, her parents desperately stressed to her doctors that their 16-year-old needed treatment for a technology addiction, too.

“We knew we couldn’t help her with that if we brought her home,” Melissa says.

Help was tough to find, as Melissa and her husband learned there is no official medical diagnosis of “technology addiction” or even “screen addiction.” Still, their search for help led them to an outdoor wilderness program in Utah that focuses on helping teens with digital addictions. Dawn spent about 5 months in the outdoor therapy program in late 2018 and early 2019. Her family says it took that long for her to “detox” from her screen addiction and get to the root of the problems that caused it.