Addiction, the media tell us, is a Bad Thing. It causes suffering. And are we surprised when the media then proceed to offer us advice about how to alleviate that suffering? And are we all that surprised when the advice is highly questionable?
From a merchandising point of view, the best advice is what would normally be considered bad advice – that is, advice that doesn't work. That way the suckers – sufferers, I mean – having failed to solve their problems, keep coming back for more "help."
Obesity provides a classic example. The media are chock full of advertisements for high-fat food. If you are persuaded by those advertisements to try the food, you become fat, too. Once you're fat, you can then turn to other parts of the media which provide advice about how to lose weight. The chief characteristic of all the advice about how to lose weight is that it doesn't work. So you stay fat and keep scanning the paper and the television for any new advice about how to lose weight. The media win every which way from Christmas. And you stay fat.
Addiction is a fairly simple phenomenon to understand. Physical addiction consists of taking chemicals which make you feel good when you take them and bad when you stop taking them. The classic example is the heroin addict, whose withdrawal symptoms are so severe that they weigh very heavily in the decision about whether or not to take more heroin. Even your common garden-variety alcoholic experiences withdrawal, however, including a marked bodily craving for the addictive drug.
Over the last forty years some forms of compulsive behaviour which are
not due to ingestion of chemicals have also been classified as so-called psychological addictions (since physical addictions affect behaviour they are also consequently psychological, but the public mind is stuck with a definition of psychology which hasn't been professionally appropriate since about 1920). Some examples are gambling addiction or sex addiction. The psychological addictions are indeed psychological, though – they are plain and simple habits due to plain and simple learning phenomena.
Let's consider gambling addiction. Anyone familiar with long-term gamblers knows that, regardless of their success or the responsibility of their betting habits, they all made many successful bets when they started out. When a pigeon in a Skinner box pecks a key (an undertaking remarkably similar to playing a slot machine), its initial pecks are usually frequently followed by presentation of food. It starts to peck more rapidly, and food can then be presented less frequently. You can eventually get a pigeon to work like mad for less food than it needs to survive. Similarly, a video lottery player can be trained to respond so frequently that he or she ends up on welfare.
An interesting aspect of supposed psychological addictions is that they are only considered addictions if they create personal problems. A gambler who makes money is simply a successful gambler, while a sex addict whose life is uncomplicated by his addiction is a rock musician.
Dealing with addictions should be straightforward. The addict to chemical substances can be dried out till the withdrawal symptoms are gone and then be provided with protections against resumption of the habit (Antabuse, for example, or behavioural analysis regimes). With psychological addictions you mainly need the behavioural analysis part – they're learning phenomena and can be dealt with as learning phenomena – and you can also do things like ban video lottery terminals, slot machines, and other forms of gambling whose resemblance to Skinner boxes is too close for comfort.
But these measures are not what you find promoted in the media. No, what television and the press tell you is either
- that addiction is a disease, or
- that you're an addict because you have an addictive personality.
The personality angle is pretty brazen. Supposedly all of us who quit smoking changed personalities. There is, anyway, little evidence that such a thing as personality exists, and more that it doesn't. I gave up drinking 26 years ago and to this day I still don't have a personality.
The conception of addiction as a disease implicitly denies the obvious facts of addiction. If physical addiction were simply a disease, surviving the throes of withdrawal should be sufficient to end the addiction. You don't find people who've had pneumonia rushing out to catch it again, but you find plenty of addicts who've been dried out and then put back on the street to fend for themselves heading straight for the nearest dealer. The so-called psychological addictions are particularly difficult to consider diseases. They have no physical symptoms apart from the occasional rush of adrenaline. If you "free" a psychological addict from those symptoms, he or she will just go back out and try to become a slave to them again.
The ideas of the addictive personality and of addiction as a disease have one big advantage, however – they can be used to make people feel inadequate, which makes them look for ways to become adequate, which means they have become a market you can sell to.
The most successful promoters of this angle these days are Oprah Winfrey and her close comrade in arms Dr. Phil McGraw (who promotes the disease angle). Oprah wants women to have high self-esteem, but much of her old show consistrd of showing women how inadequate they were – too fat, too messy, and on and on. She's got 'em whipsawed. She makes women feel so good about their prospects, but so lousy about the current state of their lives. You just have to buy her and Dr. Phil's guides to turning yourself into a worthwhile person.
And if those don't work (and if you've consulted our articles about Dr. Phil, you know why they're not likely to), you turn to another guru. There is a peculiar communism among the purveyors of self-help advice. Each turns consumers into psychologically needy sponges, and when they're done with them they let other practitioners in the field have a squeeze. Once you've learned that you're inadequate, you're going to find a lot of people ready to keep you feeling that way, for a price.
The only problem is that addicts who follow the media's advice rather than undertaking courses of treatment which have been shown to work will continue to be addicts, and we know that the toll of addiction on society is enormous. On the other hand, the purveyors of non-help to addicts tend to get enormously wealthy from it (Oprah now has a larger gross domestic product than Luxembourg), so I suppose it all evens out in the end. They profit and we, non-addicts and addicts alike, suffer. Which is fair, because we're the inadequate ones.
Marketing Misery © 2005, John FitzGerald
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