Doctor I'm a txt addict

Text messaging addicts are booking into a top clinic for treatment.

Some obsessives spend up to seven hours a day texting, developing repetitive strain injury as they type in messages.

The Priory Clinic, famed for its celebrity clients, revealed yesterday it was treating far more victims of the mobile age.

It has been monitoring a growing trend in 'behavioural addictions', including spread betting, for 18 months.

Psychologist Dr Mark Collins said: 'Some people look down on alcoholics and cocaine addicts but then spend five hours in an Internet chatroom.'

Dr Collins, who heads the addictions unit at the clinic in Roehampton, South-West London, said new treatments were designed to meet patients' changing lifestyles and medical needs.

Text addicts are treated as day or out-patients or outside working hours, including weekends.

Dr Collins said he had also noticed a rise in problems over cocaine and alcohol or alcohol and sex addiction.

Some patients who sought the clinic's help for substance abuse often had a deeper-seated psychiatric condition such as clinical depression, he added.

Former Priory patients include model Kate Moss, comedienne Ruby Wax and TV presenter Michael Barrymore.

Former world boxing champion Frank Bruno, who was sectioned recently under the Mental Health Act, was a patient at the clinic following the break-up of his marriage.