Addiction: The disease that lies

23536 said:
This can easily be a load of crap. There are many functional drug users who are swept up by this net of generalizations because to the recovery industry, people with a psychoactive chemical in their body are incapable of exercising free will.

I don't deny that there are people who have lost control and need help, but the recovery industry is all too eager to prey on people who are not addicts but have been forced into rehab by law enforcement.

I have a very deep dislike for these people.

Your industry would have a hard time existing if people weren't forced to buy your product. Therefore, I am highly skeptical of anything you say.
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Yes, me too. I totally agree also.
 
What about gambling ? that's an addiction, anyone here want to argue that it is a disease ?
 
webbykevin said:
What about gambling ? that's an addiction, anyone here want to argue that it is a disease ?
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Depends on your views regarding choice.

When your mind is constantly telling you it needs its fix, when you are compelled by yourself to use some more of your doc, I think there's a point where choice is overpowered by illogical, absent-minded instinct. At least, that's how I felt about when I was spending up to two grand per day to support my habit. In other words, IME, it definitely felt like a disease of the mind.
 
I believe it is unique to the addict whether it is a disease or not....hopefully whatever you view it as will help you to recover. I view mine as a disease...I treat it as such.
 
manboychef said:
I believe it is unique to the addict whether it is a disease or not....hopefully whatever you view it as will help you to recover. I view mine as a disease...I treat it as such.
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I also appreciate your perspective.
Drugs affect different people differently - this is well-known.
Addiction could also be completely different for different people, even with the same drug.
 
Yes...I often think about how my brother can use and then stop, whereas I cannot. We are both chefs, we both had a similar upbringing, and we are one year apart. Its odd that he could do pills for a week straight, but when they were gone he was fine, but I was pawning my shit.
 
^ Yeah, that's always interested me too. The difference between my brother's and my response to anything psychoactive was apparent right from the start. I was fascinated when he first came home from a party with 3 beers left out of his initial 6. I'd never really considered that you mightn't want to drink them all.
 
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webbykevin said:
What about gambling ? that's an addiction, anyone here want to argue that it is a disease ?
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Some do want to think of it as a disease, such as these doctors at UCLA:

Doctors treat gambling addiction as brain disease

Convinced that he was on the brink of madness, Curt seemed to be obsessed with one thought that dominated all others for four long years: He needed money, an inexhaustible pile of money, so that he could continue playing the slots.

“I just couldn’t stop thinking about it,” he recalled. “Every thought in my head was, ‘How can I get more money to keep everything going?’ These thoughts just ran rampant. It was killing me.”

Curt (not his real name) wasn’t just losing the paycheck from his job as a facilities planner for a chain of stores —his gambling habit would eventually strip him and his family of $170,000. But he was also losing time. Despite his best intentions, he said, he felt powerless to act against an unexplained compulsion to sit down at the first slot machine he saw and play 12 hours straight. “The sheer lack of sleep alone was ruining my life. I was living a lie. And then one day, I had to come clean to my wife. I had to sit down with her one afternoon and rip her heart out.”

When there was nothing left in the bank and his seven credit cards were maxed out, Curt finally sought help from Gamblers Anonymous and the UCLA Gambling Studies Program rather than become a thief. “In order to continue, I knew I would have had to rob a bank. I didn’t want to go down that road. But others have.”

The losses from gambling addiction — defined by mental health professionals as a brain disease at its most elemental form — have become so troubling that the state recently dedicated a total of $15 million for three years to fund treatment programs for any California resident who has the addiction or has been hurt by it, including family members of compulsive gamblers.
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And you can even "see" gambling addiction in scans of the brain:

Gambling addiction can be spotted in the brain
March 6, 2013

New study reveals impaired communication across various brain regions in compulsive gamblers. This suggests that gambling addiction may be more due to a deviation in the brain than a weakness of character.

A lack of self-control is one of the main problems for compulsive gamblers. These people are often mocked for not being able to stop while the going is good.

But now a sensational new study, published in the journal PNAS, suggests that a compulsive gambler’s lack of self-control may actually be caused by deviations in the brain.

“We have shown that people who suffer from compulsive gambling have less self-control than healthy people, and that this is related to changes in the brain,” says Kristine Rømer Thomsen, who took part in the study as a PhD student at Aarhus University’s Center of Functionally Integrative Neuroscience.
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