Addiction In The News

According to the New York Council on Problem Gambling, 1 million New Yorkers have a gambling problem. National Problem Gambling Awareness Week, March 7-13, gives us an opportunity to talk about this rarely discussed addiction that can have a life-changing and often swiftly devastating impact on individuals - and on their families.

Tiger Woods, who recently admitted to multiple extramarital affairs, said he is receiving treatment. David Duchovny, who plays a sex-obsessed professor on the TV show Californication, underwent rehab in 2008. Dr. Drew Pinsky has launched a reality series dealing with the subject. Sex addiction talk seems to be everywhere. But mental health experts are split on what underlies such behaviour.

Almost all people who illegally use or abuse opioid painkillers such as Oxycontin or Vicodin get the drugs from a friend or relative who had a prescription, a new report shows. In the study, which involved a 2008 survey of more than 5,300 Utah adults, almost 2 percent of respondents said they had taken an opioid pain medicine not prescribed to them over the past year.

If you have ever lost weight on a diet only to gain it all back, you were probably as perplexed as you were disappointed. You felt certain that you had conquered bad eating habits—so what caused the backslide? New research suggests that you may have succumbed to a cognitive distortion called restraint bias.

Decisions about a patients' pain treatment are now made much more collaboratively, but even in modern times, the process is fraught with moral judgment, stemming largely from the nature of available pain treatments and an incomplete understanding of how to use them. Patients who ask for more pain drugs are eyed as potential addicts; doctors who prescribe pain medications too frequently fear being arrested for it. But with about 10% to 15% of Americans, mostly in middle-age or older, suffering from chronic pain severe enough to interfere with daily life, figuring out which pain medications work best — and which are safest — is of crucial interest.

Perched on a bluff above Pacific Coast Highway, Passages Malibu Addiction Cure Center looks more like a prefab movie set than a place to kick hard drugs. Near the entrance of the garish $23 million mansion stands a glass-enclosed gym filled with the latest high-tech equipment, on which men and women work out feverishly with the assistance of hands-on trainers. The 29 comfortable beds here are currently filled with patients who pay $67,550 a month for them.

By sanctioning behavioral addictions the new DSM opens the diagnostic door to the full menu of confessional daytime TV problems: gambling, shopping, eating, playing World of Warcraft, visiting porn sites, chatting online, having sex with dozens of women with teased blonde hair (hello Tiger), getting too many tattoos, hoarding newspapers (addicted to print!), or whatever else comes along. The technology that is the destination for someone's flight from life changes so rapidly that it can never be used to define a diagnosis and resulting treatment. So, instead of hunting for new illnesses we will never be able to find, we should hunt for ways to help specific individuals who went online to solve problems and soothe the hurts that everyone feels sometimes, and ended up getting trapped there.

Zero Tolerance, Tough Love, Tough on Drugs, Blinding stupidity - call it what you will. Kudos to SBS for being the only Aussie broadcaster to run this vital item. Australia's ANCD has supporters of forced detention, random school drug testing, Swedish Zero Tolerance and a cute semantic trick called "Harm Prevention" to hide the nasty reality of behaviour modification.

The tech world may not be paying much attention to the upcoming revision of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, but maybe it should be. Due out in 2013, DSM-5 (in other words, it's the fifth edition) is intended to refine the medical diagnoses of mental illness in its various forms in the hope of leading to more sensible insurance guidelines and more effective treatments. It appears that "Internet addiction" will probably not make the cut for this version.

When it comes to your brain, falling in love closely resembles addiction and other disorders. Understanding the empirical roots of what we perceive as love sheds light on why relationships can be so torturous and addicting. Researchers have outlined the neurological effect of falling in love with a person, from the initial “crush” to long after the relationship ends. Love has quite an impact on the way the brain would regularly function otherwise and, just like alcohol, your judgment is the first thing to be impaired.