Anamnesis
Given their druthers, most of us would suffer from an awful pest: addiction. Sitting in front of a computer for several hours, the excessive cultivation of contacts in social networks, the consumption of online pornography is only a cry for help. Because: You are suffering from addiction.
But relax, there’s help.
Last week I’ve read about various types of computer or Internet addiction in different journals, one of them online, the other one on paper. The latter one was from my health insurance. The funny thing is, no definition of online or computer addiction was given; it seems that everybody knows what it is. Well, I don’t, so let us investigate this further.
Diagnosis
When splitting up the term addiction we are getting substance dependence on one hand, and behavioral addiction on the other. Let’s skip the first one: sitting in front of a computer or stroking your body parts is clearly not related to substance dependencies mentioned in DSM IV, the classification system for mental disorders. So there is behavioural addiction left. And this one is indeed interesting.
Behavioral addiction neither has found its way into DSM IV nor into the health care classification system ICD-10 yet. At present, behavioral addiction is regarded as kind of impulse control disorder, but this is not sufficient as it doesn’t satisfy phenomena like habituation and withdrawal symptoms which can grow out of behavioral addiction. This means, as always, there is need for further studies, and most likely we will know in a couple of years how sick and addicted we really are.
Therapy
This vague situation is a breeding ground for many organizations which pretend to give you help. Especially new disorders like hypersexuality enjoy great popularity among conservative circles, allowing them to pathologize a certain kind of behaviour that doesn’t meet their social and moral standards. Especially the cure of ‘porn addiction’ has come into the focus of companies that want to ‘reset’ your brain, premising the ‘brain on porn’ suffers from symptoms otherwise known from substance-related additions.
Needless to say that this fight against illness and filth is both a moral and political one. It has all features of a crusade against immorality, and they are not squeamish in the choice of weapons, knowing there’s always a doctor, a shrink, a therapy that can cure you. Many of them want to make you feel bad first, then they offer help: a network of snake oil salesmen benefits from this emotional, moral, and scientific twilight zone. Bad statistics in insufficient medical studies don’t improve the situation, they just make their little contribution to the general confusion.
To get this straight: there are, of course, people who suffer from addictions, including behavioral ones. Things are never healthy when they start slipping from your hands and controlling you. OCDs and addictions require skilled personnel for a successful cure. But the grey market of new, crude diseases, especially those with a certain social stigma that makes clear definitions and a scientific approach redundant, this fair of addictions is nothing but brainwashing. Plus the opportunity to make lots of money: the lucrative business of upsetting people and stigmatizing unwanted social behaviour is a win-win for many other people who don’t like what you’re doing now: visiting a sex-positive website, for example. The disease pattern is already defined.
In future posts we will deconstruct some tactics and manipulative techniques of various porn therapy providers.
Stay tuned,
Mason Squelch
Post Image Source: Effects of Prolonged Comsumption of Pornography, Dolf Zillmann; PD; taken from Wikipedia
