Problem addictions

Was David’s problem as serious as that of a heroin addict? Is it sensible to lump such behaviour together with addiction to drugs? Granted, the term addiction is bandied about a little too readily by chocaholics, workaholics and teens who spend a bit too long playing the latest computer game. “We can’t define it simply by excess,” says Griffiths. Yet two decades of research have convicted him that excessive behaviour can cross the line and become every bit as real an addiction as being physically dependent on a drug.

He’s not alone. Several studies of the brain and behaviour back the idea that there’s very little biological difference between what goes on in the head of a gambling addict and that of a crack addict. A growing number of researchers believe that the same processes lie behind all addictions, behavioural or chemical, whether it’s gambling or shopping, computer gaming, love, work, exercise, pornography, eating or sex. “They have more in common than different,” says Sabine Grüsser-Sinopoli, who runs a clinic and research lab for behavioural addictions at the Charité Medical University in Berlin, Germany. “Addiction is all the same.”

That’s a controversial claim. There’s a common perception that overindulgence in certain behaviours is all down to individual choice. If you are overeating, oversexed, gambling away your earnings or spending all your time online, you are more likely to be considered morally abhorrent than a victim of a disease. Calling these problems “addictions” has triggered debates about whether our society or our biology is to blame, and whether people that fall foul of a behavioural obsession should be offered help and treatment rather than punishment.

Whether you consider them true addictions or not, finding ways to attack these problem behaviours is becoming even more urgent. More and more people are going to clinics asking for help to control the need to shop, have sex or gamble, because their behaviour is ruining their lives.

Problem gambling is perhaps the most harmful of these. A 2000 survey commissioned by the British National Centre for Social Research revealed that about 1 per cent of the UK adult population had a pathological gambling problem, and the repeat survey is widely expected to show the rise – especially among women. Some researchers predict as many as 10 per cent of the US population will soon have a gambling problem.

One of the most disturbing and defining features of addiction is withdrawal. Griffiths says that addicted gamblers who are unable to engage in their habit feel similar symptoms, such as excessive moodiness, irritability, nausea, stomach cramps, headaches and sweats. “Gamblers have withdrawal symptoms like drug addicts.” Grüsser-Sinopoli has seen patients with anxiety, depression, and physical symptoms such as sweating and hallucinations, triggered by withdrawal from shopping and gambling.

The evidence that behavioural addictions are very similar to chemical one is mounting from brain studies too. According to addiction specialist Eric Nestler of the University of Taxes Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, drug addictions and “natural” addictions seem to involve shared pathways in the brain. “Take a person with sex addiction, or a pathological gambler: their brains all show abnormal responses – the same reactions to drugs of abuse,” he says.

Whether behavioural addictions, such as playing slot machines, are a gateway to more physically harmful ones is still hotly debated, just as it is with drugs. There are signs that teenage exposure to gambling or gaming seems to predispose the developing brain to more severe problems later, says Griffiths.

Peter Whybrow, author of American Mania and director of the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at the University of California, Los Angeles, agrees that our changing environment has led to the huge prevalence in behavioural addictions.

The only thing that stops us is self constraint. “If politicians and leaders understood how the brain works, they would not be building society as they are doing.”

The exercise addict

Joanne, 25, doesn’t see herself as an addict, though her habit takes up several hours of each day, occupies her thoughts continuously, and has even made her walk out of university exams. She is obsessed with exercise, mostly a type of martial arts, but any form of exercise will do. She describes the buzz as like being on amphetamines. She has developed a tolerance for it, and so has to exercise ever longer for the same effect, working out for several hours a day now just to feel normal. If she can’t, she gets anxious and irritable, and suffers headaches and nausea. She spends beyond her means to fund her habit, and has lost friends and her partner to it.

The computer addict

Jamie is a 16-year-old only child, living alone with his mother. He spends around 70 hours a week on his computer. He admits that the interest is the most important thing in his life – he likes socialising online with fellow science-fiction buffs, though he has few friends in the real world. He is overweight and unconfident, but he says the internet improves his mood. He thinks about it all the time, and gets withdrawal symptoms, becoming irritable and shaky if he cannot go online when he wants to. He sleeps irregularly, mostly logging on at night, but he denies he is addicted to his computer.

Daniel Griffiths

/From New Scientist, №22, 2006/

DO YOU KNOW THAT…?

2000 estimated number internet gambling sites.

23 million – number of online gamblers in 2005, 8 million of whom are in the US, 4 million in UK.

75% of adults in the US have gambled in the past year.

60 million – obese adults in the US.

83 % of 8 to 18-year-olds have a video game player.

2 hours – time spent gaming each day in average US household.

31 hours – average time spent online per month worldwide.

9 kilograms – amount of chocolate consumed per person per year in UK.

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