Addiction video

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Moonbo
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Addiction video

Post by Moonbo »

Interesting video I ran across, would love to get someone like DDL's opinion on it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpXuV7Ei-To
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bobby 55
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Re: Addiction video

Post by bobby 55 »

Sorry Moonbo, I'm not DDL. My sister and I were discussing addiction recently. I am from a family with a high incidence of addictive personalities. I always imagined some genetic tie-in, but the good doctor's assertion of environmental factors, such as stress, being a cause does make sense.

It was an interesting and educational twenty-seven minutes, and thanks for posting. I e-mailed my sister the link. The one thing I have found is no matter how supportive you are, recovery only starts when the person addicted decides enough is enough.
Growing old is inevitable.......Growing up is optional
AEmer
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Re: Addiction video

Post by AEmer »

Sorry Moonbo, I'm not DDL.
It's ok. Few of us are lucky enough to be.
Nobodys perfect.

(Except ddl)
AEmer
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Re: Addiction video

Post by AEmer »

Now I also want DDL's oppinion on it, after watching it.

It'd be great to get it verified; I'm sure everybody has destructive patterns in their lives that they recognize as destructive, but feel powerless to get out of. This guys perscription for how to dismantle them...if it does work, that'd be interesting.
DDL
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Re: Addiction video

Post by DDL »

Hah. No pressure then.

It's really quite hard to comment on something delivered via lengthy interview (as opposed to text where it's piss-easy to reread a sentence to double check "he actually SAID that??")..so this will perhaps be frustratingly vague in summary.

My general feel is that while his aims are laudable and sensible and should be encouraged, he himself is super full of shit. Now obviously there are caveats, in that it's a radio interview (not a scientific paper) so he probably wants to concentrate on getting his message across rather than on supporting his claims, AND he's got a book or two to flog, so he's gonna be pushing for that too.

But still, most of his arguments essentially boil down to petitio principii fallacies (at least as presented). They assume X is true, look really hard for X and only X, find X, thus X is true.

So for instance, "all down-and-out drug users were abused as children, thus child abuse leads to later drug addiction."

Er..okaaaay. Or possibly, child abuse leads to homelessness, and homelessness leads to drug addiction? Or even the somewhat prosaic "drug addicts will tell you what they think you want to hear if you look sympathetic enough and are offering sterile needles and a warm, clean room".

There are a LOT of wider issues he doesn't appear to consider, essentially, and lots of utterly unsubstantiated facts he happily spouts as if they were gospel.
"We're tribal animals, not nuclear family animals: we need to be in big tribal groups [citation needed]. Lack of this tribal grouping leads children to view other children as their peers, and this makes them form gangs [citation needed]. African children don't view other african children as their peers [citation needed] and thus don't form gangs [citation oh you get the idea]"

...seriously WHAT. For a start he's basically calling all african villagers "primitive humans" (thanks, science!(TM)), insinuating that we've done in-depth peer-group studies of childhood around the world, and then claiming that having other children as your peer group leads to gangs. Not, you know, the difference between growing up in a sub-saharan african village vs growing up in a shitty housing estate in east acton.


The aboriginal example was particularly egregious: "the aboriginal peoples had access to loads of addictive substances, tobacco, alcohol and peyote, but they were fine! Then we turned up and put them in camps and stressed them a lot, and now look: they're all drug addicts and alcoholics!" (I'm assuming he actually means native americans..coz: peyote?)


....failing to consider that in precolonial times, tobacco and alcohol may indeed have been available, but not in ready-rolled/ready-brewed+distilled form, easily available from almost anywhere that has "shops". Note, for instance, that poyote addictions are fairly low, because peyote (unlike booze and fags) is not produced on an industrial scale. Addiction may increase due to stress, sure, but addiction also may increase due to fucktons of easily-obtained addictive substances. See, for example, all of nature: give..pretty much any animal with the ability to drink access to alcohol, and they will get shitfaced. It's not that all of nature was stressed as a child, it's the fact that it feels gooood. The only thing stopping the world being full of angry drunk wasps is availibility.

He basically appears to consider drug addiction to be almost solely due to abuse/stress (often at a parental remove, usually validated by animal studies which are..simplistic at best, see drunk animals -above-), and not something that a person can really avoid if they have all the risk factors.

So there's that.

He also, however, seems to consider everything potentially an addiction: Smoke a lot? SMOKER! Drink a lot? ALCOHOLIC! Work a lot? WORKAHOLIC! Play skyrim a lot? BETHESDAHOLIC! He does at least attempt to address that there are 'healthy' and 'less healthy' levels of 'amount of thing', i.e. one CAN draw a line somewhere between "working hard" and "working pathologically hard", but doesn't seem to put this into any real context, nor does he seem to consider that just as "working hard but not pathologically hard" can be fairly healthy, so can "drinking but not drinking to pathological levels", or even "taking heroin but not taking heroin to pathological levels". Generally speaking, if anything can be an addiction, then either the entire world is utterly addicted to everything, or you accept that there's a continuum of 'addictedness' in every situation, and it's not a simply as "addict vs non-addict". If everything is an addiction, then THIS IS WHY WE CAN'T HAVE NICE THINGS.

He also states that because of this definition of addiction, we're all basically addicts in many ways. That this is almost totally mutually exclusive with his claim that addiction stems solely from abuse/stress does not seem to raise any concerns.

Furthermore, he appears to ascribe to the Alcoholics Anonymous approach of "admitting you have no power over your addiction", which I personally feel is a bullshit cop-out. If you admit that, then you might as well admit you have no power over any actions whatsoever and that you're just a mechanistic meatpuppet acting out base instincts derived from neurochemicals released in a semideterministic fashion. Go grunt in a corner until you grow some fucking self-respect.

Note that technically, "having no power" may in fact be the case: free will may be entirely an illusion, but because the end results are indistinguishable, it doesn't matter. If you believe you have the power to control yourself, you de facto do, whether it's truly voluntary or not. So basically, admit you have a problem, sure, but don't admit you're powerless to do anything about it, because it's both self-defeatist and self-absolving: "I'm not a smackhead, I'm just not in control of my urges" implies unwillingness to even try.

(Of course if help is offered, fuck: take it! Don't conflate 'having some fucking willpower' with 'doing it alone', but still: realise you have some fucking willpower)

Now in terms of his ideas for treatment, I'm all for that. Treating people with respect and giving them help and actual treatment should pretty much be the default fashion of addressing any antisocial behaviour, because that's pretty much the only way you can make people better, rather than just "locked away for a while". Really though, it's more the hallmark of a decent, rational society than it is the hallmark of a crazy, revolutionary but backed by science!(TM) scheme that is showing great results!(TM). Prison has never really been about punishment, though it's easy to think of it that way. It's primarily a deterrent, and secondarily a cheap and brainless strategy for removing troublesome people from the civilian pool. Not so much solving a problem as putting the problem somewhere else for a while. Rehabilitation is a much much better idea, in principle, but it's not cheap and brainless. Humans as a whole LIKE cheap and brainless solutions.

So if it takes this kind of pseudo-psychology to get humane approaches to rehabilitation, then WOO, GO PSEUDO-PSYCHOLOGY!


TL:DR version: man makes decent conclusions in spite of misrepresenting research and simplifying complex issues to justify his own opinion, which he is also selling, at his_name.com. Also, my book: "OMG LIFE IS SO MUCH MORE FUCKING COMPLICATED THAN I WANT IT TO BE" is now available through amazon.
AEmer
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Re: Addiction video

Post by AEmer »

I think we should get criminals addicted to a substance that's very hard to produce, then use it to get them to be productive members of society.

I don't know why this isn't being done already.

Also, there's a cat meme for this is why we can't have nice things.
http://weknowmemes.com/wp-content/uploa ... gs-cat.jpg

Now you know.

Finally, thanks for the critical writeup. I got completely suckered by a lot of what he was saying; much of it is clearly pandering bs.
DDL
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Re: Addiction video

Post by DDL »

Thing is, a lot of it is true, it's just not...the whole truth.

Stress during childhood, and indeed stress during gestation are both unarguably factors that predispose you to substance abuse...but all that's doing is changing the odds slightly. It's not a cause in and of itself, which is why it's quite frustrating to hear this sort of thing being misrepresented.

Plus of course it plays into the whole "I'm just a victim of society, guv'nor" mindset, when the correct cry is "I'm a victim of society, guv'nor..though I am also a douchebag, fyi".

In terms of beating addictions, I personally feel the best approach is

>admit you have a problem, and that you actually WANT to not have a problem (this latter is crucial)
>admit that no matter what your circumstances, it's still basically your own fucking fault. Deal with this.
>accept help wherever it is offered. Learn to live with being deeply embarassed.
>never ever think you've beaten the addiction. This one is a tad cliche, but kinda true: an alcoholic can still be an alcoholic even when not drinking. The drinking is simply a symptom of the chronic NEED for a drink: the need will be there whether you actually drink or not.
>treat every 'clean' day as a victory, and every 'fail' as a mere blip. Even the smoker who says "quitting's easy, I've done it hundeds of times (OLOL)" is better than someone who didn't try. Every day not smoking is a day not smoking. That's one day more than not bothering at all. NET GAIN!

So, accept help, exert IRON WILLPOWER, and don't beat yourself up too much if IRON WILLPOWER lets you down every once in a while.
bobby 55
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Re: Addiction video

Post by bobby 55 »

never ever think you've beaten the addiction. This one is a tad cliche, but kinda true: an alcoholic can still be an alcoholic even when not drinking. The drinking is simply a symptom of the chronic NEED for a drink: the need will be there whether you actually drink or not.
Yeah, when offered a drink my dad would politely refuse saying he was a recovering alcoholic. He did that every time, even umpteen years after giving the booze away. He never said I used to be an alcoholic.

He also said certain personality traits could lead to an addiction to alcohol. Anyhow , there's physical addiction and psychological addiction, the latter is the one willpower on the part of the individual is needed. A nurse in thoracic medicine told me cigarettes are more psychologically addictive than heroine. That's kinda scary.
Growing old is inevitable.......Growing up is optional
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