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New Model of Addiction and Recovery
 Cerberus.Conagh
Server: Cerberus
Game: FFXI
Posts: 3189
By Cerberus.Conagh 2015-01-24 22:04:44
masturbating 16 hours a day and basically destroying the skin of your genitals is not what I'd call "healthy sexual interest
What if this wasn't destroying the skin on your genitals though!
Sorry couldn't resist.
There's far too many things humans try to explain and do a piss poor job at doing.
 Asura.Jezzus
Server: Asura
Game: FFXI
Posts: 410
By Asura.Jezzus 2015-01-24 22:07:54
All those questions can be asked about my eating.
And that's an inherent problem we have right now in sorting out cause and effect with obesity: are people addicted to food? It's pretty common to talk about a carbohydrate addiction, if only because it's basically the easiest food macro (other than alcohol -- yes, a poison based on carbohydrate is considered a macro-nutrient, *** if I know why) to eliminate, but is it really?
Getting past the obvious need to eat, it's still a habitual thing, such as sharing food when socializing. I know some people who only smoke tobacco when socializing (me, for instance), ditto people alcohol (also me). Do I control food? My waistline says no, but I can't live without some, so where do we draw the line? Hindrance is another one. I'm probably in better health than most people in spite of being overweight and, indeed, would not have as much muscle mass if I didn't feed the calories into it.
Yes eating is identified as a major addiction with some people. Also the additives in food now are not doing it justice. Whether being chemically addictive, psychologically addictive(taste good), unhealthy, or what ever..
Clearly one can live without caffeine or cocaine, but one can live without Twinkies and asparagus, too. Even things that are predominantly healthy to eat, like broccoli, come with serious caveats sometimes (goiter). Before we exclude food and try to limit addiction to just substances and maybe gambling, there is documentation proving people are addicted to sex (masturbating 16 hours a day and basically destroying the skin of your genitals is not what I'd call "healthy sexual interest") and, like food, it's not reasonable to suggest one can live without sex, regardless of what religious dogma may claim.
Are video games or working out in the gym addictions? They can stimulate the reward center of the brain and we've heard stories about people taking both too far (steroid users effectively destroying their body being just one aspect of the latter), but the jury remains undecided.
Even a really simple definition like "Something that disrupts your life" doesn't work. A nurse working 70 hours a week is having his life disrupted by his job but it's surely not an addiction, even if he draws considerable pleasure from his work.
It's a problem.
Even charity can become a problem without moderation.
Asura.Jezzus
Server: Asura
Game: FFXI
Posts: 410
By Asura.Jezzus 2015-01-24 22:11:51
This is not to say the article you linked is wrong. I believe it right as one marker in a spectrum
Server: Shiva
Game: FFXI
Posts: 3618
By Shiva.Onorgul 2015-01-24 22:48:52
Yeah, I have lots of reservations about assuming there's only one factor. Alcoholism appears to run in families... but so does poverty (generational poverty if someone feels like wiki'ing that). And yet there's actually a negative correlation between alcoholism and poverty in spite of public perception. Tracking what people do and how things work is remarkably difficult even though our brains can largely be characterized as a trillion-line series of "if-then" commands.
Even if we assume that social isolation/alienation is not the singular defining factor, in my experience, it's a rather huge one. No one is surprised to see depression, anxiety, and several other mood conditions or disorders linked with addiction behavior, but I think psychologists and researchers bend over backwards (possibly due to the whips of their paymasters) to avoid suggesting that one causes the other. I'd almost swear I've seen people trying to suggest that they don't exacerbate one another and that, I can say with surety, would be utter nonsense.
In my experience with people who have troubles and addiction problems, when isolation isn't clearly the concern, alienation eventually rears its head. I speak to enough friends who can be coaxed into admitting they're depressed and whose drinking or pot habits I've observed to be fairly frequent (not going to claim addiction since, as established, we have no clue what to call addiction), but you'd never guess it to look at their circumstances. Sometimes it's something really obvious, like their favorite aunt just died, sometimes it's obvious after the fact, like when they finally come out of the closet. I have family members who had serious problems with alcohol that suddenly went away after meeting their future spouse and all I can wonder is, "Will you ever tell us what the problem was?"
I suppose I latch onto this hypothesis just because I'm prone to isolation, alienation, and depression. I worry something could flip. But I'm an unhelpful test subject because my brain is literally wired differently and being alone doesn't have the same effect on me as normal people. Maybe that could be a help: examine high-functioning autists, people who deliberately isolate (and are often alienated for being socially atypical), and consider our addiction habits.
Bismarck.Magnuss
Server: Bismarck
Game: FFXI
Posts: 28615
By Bismarck.Magnuss 2015-01-24 23:03:48
I clicked on this thread expecting to see pictures of models. I am disappoint.
Someone better pony up a picture of Kate Upton or something.
[+]
Server: Shiva
Game: FFXI
Posts: 3618
By Shiva.Onorgul 2015-01-25 00:00:56
I considered acceding to your perversion by attaching someone I find attractive, but then it occurred to me that I'd rather not associate someone whose job it is to look pretty arbitrarily with addiction problems. And I'm all out of copies of Zero-G Jugs, so tough.
Asura.Jezzus
Server: Asura
Game: FFXI
Posts: 410
By Asura.Jezzus 2015-01-25 00:04:52
I clicked on this thread expecting to see pictures of models. I am disappoint.
Someone better pony up a picture of Kate Upton or something. 
 Bahamut.Kara
Server: Bahamut
Game: FFXI
Posts: 3544
By Bahamut.Kara 2015-01-25 00:42:22
I clicked on this thread expecting to see pictures of models. I am disappoint.
Someone better pony up a picture of Kate Upton or something. 
[+]
I don't post topics often and couldn't decide where this would go, but I figure it'll raise enough controversy to warrant this section.
Caveats up front, this is a blog, not a scientific report, and it's from the Huffington Post.
TL;DR summary: Other models of addiction (disease model, chemical dependence model, etc.) fail to explain why certain groups administered legal or illegal drugs fail to become addicts. Specifically, drugs were commonplace among US soldiers in Vietnam and hospital patients are regularly given opioids, including morphine and what we call heroin, yet when returning home the former had much lower usage/addiction rates than would be presumed from their use in Vietnam and the latter has a virtually non-existent addiction rate (note: this appears to be specific to hospital-administered opioids rather than self-administered as by a doctor's prescription).
The proposed idea is that people are using drugs and other addictive behaviors as amelioration for something lacking in their lives, which the author suggests is comfort and social bonding.
The title is annoyingly click-baity: The Likely Cause of Addiction Has Been Discovered, and It Is Not What You Think Excerpt of the article behind the spoiler.
Quote: "If you had asked me what causes drug addiction at the start, I would have looked at you as if you were an idiot, and said: "Drugs. Duh." It's not difficult to grasp. I thought I had seen it in my own life. We can all explain it. Imagine if you and I and the next twenty people to pass us on the street take a really potent drug for twenty days. There are strong chemical hooks in these drugs, so if we stopped on day twenty-one, our bodies would need the chemical. We would have a ferocious craving. We would be addicted. That's what addiction means.
One of the ways this theory was first established is through rat experiments -- ones that were injected into the American psyche in the 1980s, in a famous advert by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America. You may remember it. The experiment is simple. Put a rat in a cage, alone, with two water bottles. One is just water. The other is water laced with heroin or cocaine. Almost every time you run this experiment, the rat will become obsessed with the drugged water, and keep coming back for more and more, until it kills itself.
The advert explains: "Only one drug is so addictive, nine out of ten laboratory rats will use it. And use it. And use it. Until dead. It's called cocaine. And it can do the same thing to you."
But in the 1970s, a professor of Psychology in Vancouver called Bruce Alexander noticed something odd about this experiment. The rat is put in the cage all alone. It has nothing to do but take the drugs. What would happen, he wondered, if we tried this differently? So Professor Alexander built Rat Park. It is a lush cage where the rats would have colored balls and the best rat-food and tunnels to scamper down and plenty of friends: everything a rat about town could want. What, Alexander wanted to know, will happen then?
In Rat Park, all the rats obviously tried both water bottles, because they didn't know what was in them. But what happened next was startling.
The rats with good lives didn't like the drugged water. They mostly shunned it, consuming less than a quarter of the drugs the isolated rats used. None of them died. While all the rats who were alone and unhappy became heavy users, none of the rats who had a happy environment did.
At first, I thought this was merely a quirk of rats, until I discovered that there was -- at the same time as the Rat Park experiment -- a helpful human equivalent taking place. It was called the Vietnam War. Time magazine reported using heroin was "as common as chewing gum" among U.S. soldiers, and there is solid evidence to back this up: some 20 percent of U.S. soldiers had become addicted to heroin there, according to a study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry. Many people were understandably terrified; they believed a huge number of addicts were about to head home when the war ended.
But in fact some 95 percent of the addicted soldiers -- according to the same study -- simply stopped. Very few had rehab. They shifted from a terrifying cage back to a pleasant one, so didn't want the drug any more."
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