Other things which also do not actually exist: love addiction, shopping addiction, food addiction, porn addiction, Internet addiction, video game addiction, gun addiction, or any other kind of non-substance-related addiction.
Of course people can have compulsive, self-destructive, or otherwise problematic behavior related to sex, shopping, food, porn, video games, etc. There are people who use sex to get attention or to numb their pain. You can have a problem related to sex that needs treatment; hell, for that matter, you can have a problem related to sex that ruins your life. But they’re not addiction. The addiction model just doesn’t work to describe non-substance-related compulsive behavior.
There are some people in the poly-kinky community who spend a lot of time thinking about and having sex. They go to munches and orgies and the Folsom Street Fair; they’ve had tons of casual sex and dozens if not hundreds of partners; they have to hide large swathes of their lives from bosses, family, and ‘nilla friends; they have Serious Opinions about figging. It happens. But it would be absurd to consider happy. functional people with friends and jobs “sex addicts” just because their hobby happens to be sexuality.
Similarly, not everyone who occasionally masturbates for two hours is a porn addict, and not everyone who really loves food is a food addict. Nevertheless, Cosmo is talking about how ice cream is totally the same as crack you guys and Christian websites talk about addictive sexual sins. Newsflash: you don’t have to be addicted to ice cream or masturbation to want to do it a lot. People like masturbation and ice cream because they’re fun.
On the other hand, I am prone to self-destructive sexual behavior: that is, I tend to assume that my sexual partners hate me and have sex with them because the only reason anyone would put up with me is for orgasms. (For the record, my partners do not believe any of this.) But because my self-destructive sexual behavior usually comes up in long-term romantic relationships, I won’t get diagnosed as a ‘sex addict.’ In fact, the happy kinkster with Serious Opinions about figging would probably be classified as a sex addict, and I wouldn’t. That’s just fucked up.
The addiction model also offers a standard cure: abstinence. Sex addicts stop having sex; video game addicts stop playing video games; food addicts control the amount they eat. But abstinence isn’t always the solution.
To talk about my sex example again: the solution was not “Ozy stops having sex with long-term romantic partners.” (I mean, I did end up stopping having sex with my long-term romantic partners, but that was an entirely unrelated issue.) The solution was “Ozy learns to reality-check zir beliefs about relationships and to communicate zir needs for attention and validation.” The problem wasn’t my dysfunctional sexual behavior; that was just the symptom. My problem is that I keep fucking concluding people I love hate me based on no evidence. If I’d just stopped having sex with long-term romantic partners, I would have found some other horrible dysfunctional way to try to keep people I love from hating me– and I would have missed out on all the totally functional relationship sex.
And for a lot of dysfunctional and compulsive behavior, the same thing is true. Sure, there are people who play video games instead of sleeping as a dysfunctional anxiety coping mechanism. But you’re going to get a lot farther teaching them how to deal with anxiety than you will stopping them from playing video games. Sure, there are people who spend twelve hours on Tumblr because they’re depressed and numbing themselves, but Wellbutrin will help a lot more than not going online ever again.
I mean, obviously, you might treat the guy who spends twelve hours at a time on Tumblr for his depression and then he won’t spend twelve hours at a time on Tumblr anymore. But that’s a side effect, not the goal; the goal is for him to not be depressed. If you treat his depression and he’s like “actually, all my friends are on Tumblr and my hobby is creating humorous gifsets, so I’m going to continue having Tumblr marathons, thanks,” that is also okay. (Compare this with addiction, where if you treat someone for the underlying issues that make them take heroin and they keep taking heroin, the treatment was probably not successful.)
Furthermore, I don’t think that what gets classified as “addictions” is accidental. I sleep a lot when I’m depressed, sometimes fourteen hours a day; being alive hurts and I don’t want to kill myself so I just want to be conscious as little as possible. One time I lost my job because I kept sleeping through work. But no one has ever come up with the idea of a “sleep addict.”
The things that get called addictions are things that some people feel are Wrong but other people keep doing anyway. Marry diet magazines and high-fructose corn syrup and you get food addiction. The demise of old sexual standards in the wake of the sexual revolution? Sex addiction and porn addiction. The kids and their new technology that the grown-ups are scared of and are sure must be bad somehow? Video game addiction and Internet addiction.
So you don’t get “sleep addicts,” because there are very few moralists talking about how evil it is that some people want to get ten hours a night. That’s unfair to people who genuinely do have self-destructive behavior that no one thinks is Wrong, and to people who just like Wrong Things a lot and really do not deserve a bunch of people calling them addicts for it.
….That Forbes article is the most fractally wrong thing on the subject of shooting I have ever read and that is saying a lot.
….Also on the subjects of dopamine, neurotransmitters, the science of reward and addiction, crime statistics, and physics. I know this was in no way the point of your post but wow-just-WOW.
I might agree with you, but I do have a close friend who was a gambling addict. He sounded as bad as I ever did (with all the substances)… he would stay up for days at a time, all hopped up on whatever it is that makes you think you will WIN. When I told him I won $40 recently, he said he would have used that as an excuse to go on for several more hours, that little bit of positive reinforcement would have been enough to trigger a torrent of more gambling… sounds like addiction to me. But I think its the adrenalin, the same thing as people “addicted to risk” who do things like skydiving or re-enlisting over and over…adrenalin IS a substance.
See, it gets dicey.
It absolutely possible to be addicted to have a non-substance related addiction. See: gambling.
“The things that get called addictions are things that some people feel are Wrong but other people keep doing anyway. ”
Society says that exercise is a good thing, but doctors are now starting to talk about exercise addiction. .
I have a question about your what-gets-called-addiction paradigm: why has there never been (to my knowledge) a rock and roll addiction? Plenty of people (especially parents) back in the day were genuinely scared of rock music, getting morally outraged by its popularity, and some still are. Why no addiction?
I can’t recall where, so take this with a grain of salt. But I believe I read a psychiatrist who said that behavioral addictions (specifically talking about sex addiction) exist (the actual addiction, as I understood it, is addiction to dopamine or other brain chemicals, like Daisy Deadhead suggested about adrenaline), but are much rarer than commonly described and that most things people describe as sex addiction, even if it’s self destructive, is not actually an addiction.
If your (potentially self-destructive) sexual behavior is rooted in (your ideas about) relationships with other people or other people’s expectations, it’s not sex addiction. If you just enjoy sex a lot, that’s not sex addiction, even if it causes you to take unhealthy risks. In fact, enjoyment of sex is a negative indicator of sex addiction (according to her): in an actual sex addict, the compulsion towards sex is accompanied by a reduction in the ability of sex to fulfill the (normal, healthy) desire for sex.
FWIW, I’m both a mental health professional, and have a partner who had a porn/sex addiction (which was not treated through abstinence from sex, but through a lot of cognitive work on the thoughts that led to triggers and the habits that formed around those triggers – some of treatment was abstaining from the triggered behaviors but not from anything and everything sexual).
“The addiction model just doesn’t work to describe non-substance-related compulsive behavior.” You forgot to insert the “for me” disclaimer there. It doesn’t work for you. It does for some people.
@Ozy:
I’m inclined to disagree with your basic premise, but in an odd way.
Um, suffice to say that I’ve noticed a number of common threads between certain compulsive behaviors, eating disorders, and so-called “addictions,” whether or not they are addictions to recreational drugs, sex, rock-and-roll, adrenaline, war, gambling, video games, etc. I will hereafter refer to these compulsive behaviors, phobias, eating disorders, and addictions as “dependencies,” for lack of a better shorthand. There are no connotations inherent in this word choice.
Note that I’m not trying to lump every disorder into a single category, nor am I trying to trivialize, marginalize, or pigeonhole anyone’s experience. I’m just trying to report on my own experiences, in which some “dependencies” tend to share certain traits.
Note also that “liking something a lot” or “spending resources on something” does not constitute a “dependencies.” Again: here, “dependencies” is a shorthand for compulsive behaviors and “addictions.”
The common traits shared “cravings” are as follows:
1). “Dependencies” cannot be satisfied directly: an anorexic will never be thin enough; this is often because indulging the “dependency” is often a proxy for something else
2). Resisting a “dependency” is not a matter of willpower (this is one of the reasons that so-called “addiction” is typically treated with abstinence — see below for my thoughts on this)
3). Indulging a “dependency” often meets an end that is not directly related to the “dependency” itself — anorexics and bulemics, for example, often achieve a temporary sense of worth or self-esteem from indulging their “dependencies” that is utterly unrelated to empirical observations (things like body weight, etc.): “I’m doing something to make myself thinner (and thereby more acceptable to society)” is often more important than any specific body weight (target body weights for anorexics tend to occupy a sliding scale, regardless).
4). Indulging a “dependency” is often ritualistic (i.e. the act of indulging a craving is often repetitive and serves a purpose in and of itself) and/or the result of an intellectual or emotional habit that has developed over time
5). “Dependencies” can sometimes be triggered by exposure
6). “Dependencies” often have a biochemical component
The reason so-called “addictions” are traditionally treated via abstinence is because willpower makes no difference when resisting a “craving.” When you are dealing with habitual indulgence of a “dependency” (regardless of the nature of the “dependency:” sex, gambling, pain, whatever), willpower will not stop you from indulging it; cause-and-affect reasoning has no bearing on these matters. Abstinence is a crude-but-effective response: since willpower doesn’t work, quit the “dependency” cold turkey. It’s rather like throwing Ritalin at a kid who shows symptoms of ADD.
In my experience, “dependencies” should instead be addressed in the following way:
1). Does indulging the “dependencies” harm the subject, whether it is a craving for food, sex, pain, self-starvation, etc?
2). What function does indulging the “dependencies” perform? What purpose does it serve? Self-esteem? A rush of some kind?
3). Can substitutes for the “dependency” be found that are less harmful?
4). Can the “dependency” be indulged at levels that are not harmful?
5). What emotional and intellectual habits has the subject formed that lead to the presence of the “dependency,” and can these habits be altered?
Again: there is a difference between “liking something a lot” and “dependencies.”
My point here is that so-called “psychological addictions,” here falling under the general heading of “dependencies” share a lot of properties with chemical addictions.
In closing, allow me to provide an anecdote.
My father drinks. A lot. On a regular basis. He isn’t angry or violent, though he is occasionally maudlin. He just sits in his back room, drinking wine. To my mind, this constitutes a “dependency.”
Here is how and why he does it (though he may not be aware of all of this consciously):
1). He uses alcohol frequently, habitually, and ritualistically; he cannot resist it via willpower; he doesn’t merely “like it a lot;” using it performs both direct and indirect functions for him
2). Physical evidence that it is damaging his body makes no difference (he rationalizes the evidence away as evidence of something else)
3). He formed the habit of using alcohol to self-medicate the fact that he doesn’t know how to relax without chemical assistance; he has no close friends; he has no activities besides work; and his marriage did not meet his needs (but he is trapped in it)
Now, if he were willing to work on it (that is, if he reached rock-bottom – the impetus for change has to come from within, otherwise it is not legitimate), he would probably have to find a romantic relationship that supplements what he can’t get with his wife; find a close friend or two; find a hobby; and learn relaxation techniques. This would address the cause of his reliance on alcohol, but he would also have to break the habit of relying on alcohol to remedy his concerns regarding these matters; this would involve changing his habits of how he thinks about and feels regarding the issues I described above. If both of these conditions were met, then he could doubtless consume alcohol safely and recreationally, because it would not be filling these other roles — abstinence from alcohol would not be necessary one the root causes of his dependence on it, and the habits that sustain this dependence, were altered.
Here’s the thing: I’ve seen exactly this sort of behavior in other people towards things besides alcohol. They share common threads, if you will — which I enumerated above.
This leads me to believe that physical, chemical, and psychological addictions; eating disorders; and compulsive behaviors occupy similar intellectual and emotional territory. Hence, they fall under the general heading of “dependency.”
I agree that the addiction model for things that can’t create actual addiction isn’t very good. But there are no other models. (Oh look, a shamelessly self-promoted post about that.)
Addicts talk about what they’re after – not the behavior/substance directly, but an escape from big painful complicated neverending struggling and into complacence. They talk about the process of quitting and staying off, about how to get help, about what to do if you fall off the wagon, about what’s down the road. There are cultural norms of what to answer when someone says “I’m trying to quit”.
Whereas the only answers you’ll get otherwise are either “you’re lazy and stupid, try harder” or some pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking about fixing the root cause by manufactured epiphany. (There is profit in solving root causes, but it’s Lord of the Rings, not Disney; you still have to rebuild and some damage is permanent.)
Gambling, in common with substance addiction, gives a very strong chemical up and down – a down lower than a person’s normal level, because they’ve usually lost a lot of money. Addiction spirals because the highs are less and less satisfying and the lows just get lower and lower. Narcotics and alcohol work in very much the same way – the more frequently you take them, the less they do for you, the crapper the level you return to afterwards.
It’s tricky to see how sex could work like that, because orgasms don’t get weaker the more you have, and whilst some people feel flat, bored, ashamed etc. after sex, it’s not an automatic chemical low.
However, the things we classify as addiction are on a spectrum – there’s no neat definition which includes things pretty much everyone would consider addiction but outright excludes behaviour like shopping or sex. After all, cigarettes produce only psychological withdrawal symptoms (you don’t get pain or sickness if you stop smoking), but most people acknowledge that nicotine is addictive. There’s an awful lot of controversy over how bad the withdrawal symptoms of opiates actually are – obviously, a baby born addicted to heroin has big problems, but for an adult, well, loads of people have to take powerful opiates after an injury of operation and come off it again no trouble.
This doesn’t mean addiction isn’t a very deal that ruins people lives and sometimes kills them, but it is all about the mind, in the context of life circumstances, rather than the thing that folks get hooked to. Some mental health professionals prefer to talk about addiction as a symptom ,or the manifestation of the greater problem (depression, PTSD etc.).
Abstinence is not the only treatment for addiction and addiction is not the only mental condition characterised by compulsive self-destructive behaviour. (Self-harm and eating-disorders have strong similarities but we don’t treat them the same way).
Which begs the question, if someone frames their situation as sex addiction, and isn’t using it as excuse for reckless, coercive or treacherous behaviour, why not let them frame it that way, if that helps them begin to address the problem?
The sleep thing is, I think, also pretty interesting. I also sleep A LOT (as in, 10 hours a night when not depressed, if at all depressed up to something like 18-20 hours a day) and while nobody’s ever said I’m addicted to sleep, I do get a lot of judgement for sleeping so much. Whereas my father, who also has depression and sleep problems associated with it, gets no judgement. Why? Because his sleep disorder is insomnia, not hypersomnia.
I have had a number of behavioural addictions, the most serious by far was danger. I was addicted to a feeling that is not adrenaline, but a state of extreme alertness that I only get when in serious danger. The most dangerous place I’ve been is 150 meters up a cliff with no ropes. For mid-week fixes, cycling like a maniac, climbing buildings, and stealing interesting objects was a good enough rush.
Each time I needed my fix I had to go further and further to get the same rush. Normal life is not the same, and it felt completely dulled in comparison. I needed the rush to feel normal.
The Goldfish: After all, cigarettes produce only psychological withdrawal symptoms (you don’t get pain or sickness if you stop smoking
I must disagree… the headaches of nicotine-withdrawal are ferocious, some of the worst you can ever experience. Aspirin, OTC meds, do not touch it. My husband had it even worse than I did. (Obviously, it will be different depending on brand, frequency, how deeply one inhaled, etc.)
All you can think of is: I know what will make the headache go away.
Now, this was way back in the day of no nicotine patches; I did it the old fashioned way. But I am here to tell you, it is as hard to quit as any of the Major Drugs/alcohol,most of which I have also quit.
Alice and Mike, loved your comments.
I’d say that you’re both right and wrong. Where you are right is that there isn’t for example book addiction- but what you talk about is the use of the term “addiction” in popular psychology from people who dunno a thing. Where you are wrong is that doctors and scientists do have certain criteria for addiction which usually include dysfanctionality in life. Then people can have obsessions and irrational fears that are problematic or kinks and fetishes who are just ‘deviant’ but not unhealthy (well most of the times).
Daisy Deadhead: I must disagree… the headaches of nicotine-withdrawal are ferocious, some of the worst you can ever experience.
I’m sorry, I didn’t know that happened. I’ve never smoked and my mind seems blissfully disinclined towards addiction. However, I am hypersensitive to most drugs, and have had very unpleasant withdrawal symptoms from prescription meds and caffeine, far in excess of expected responses, so I sympathise. And despite what I said about opiates, I take opiates all the time on account of chronic pain, and know that what happens when I miss a dose is extremely unpleasant (although it’s hardly Trainspotting – it’s like suddenly having the flu, with fever and weakness, plus a ramping up of the underlying pain I take the drugs to reduce). Well done if you managed to quit for good!
Just in case anyone comes this way looking for such advice, I wrote a post several years back about chemical addiction with advice about weaning oneself off prescription meds.
@The Goldfish:
In fact, if I correctly psychiatrist talking about sex addiction I mentioned, orgasms DO get weaker for some (rare) people. That’s why enjoyment of sex is a negative indicator for sex addiction: in a sex addict, the sex act suffers from the same diminishing satisfaction you mention.