Behavioral Addiction - Definitions

Definitions

Increasingly referred to as process addiction or non-substance-related addiction behavioral addiction includes a compulsion to repeatedly engage in an action until said action causes serious negative consequences to the person's physical, mental, social, and/or financial well-being. One sign that a behavior has become addictive is if it persists despite these consequences.

The ICD-10 of the World Health Organization does not single out behavioural addictions as an independent spectrum of mental disorders. Its recognition among psychiatrists is supposed to be hampered by the fact that the aetiology and pathogenetic mechanisms of the whole variety of addictive behaviour patterns are as yet undetermined. As a rule, different scientists tackle with different deviations, with the consequence that the results obtained include but fragments of information concerning particular forms of addiction. Few, if any, complex and methodologically validated studies have been made of addiction as such. The very concept of behavioural addiction is to be explicated. Research workers point out the lack of a definition of addiction which is scientifically useful.

Current investigations set out to clarify definitions and devise a diagnostic system. Patrick Carnes attaches paramount importance to a pathological relationship with a mood-altering experience. Aviel Goodman indicates that Carnes’s formulation represents an advance from earlier definitions because it implies that the basis of addiction is not a substance or a behaviour but an alteration of the emotional state. And yet this approach is susceptible to the criticism. Unless Carnes’s definition is followed by a specific definition of “pathological relationship,” it does not provide enough information to be useful in a scientific context. While sharing the advantages of Carnes’s definition, A. Goodman endeavours to propose diagnostic criteria specified in a format similar to that of DSM. He defines addiction as a disorder in which a behaviour that can function both to produce pleasure and to provide escape from internal discomfort is employed in a pattern characterized by:

1. recurrent failure to control the behaviour;
2. continuation of the behaviour despite significant harmful consequences.

Tsezar Korolenko who was the first to suggest a classification of non-chemical dependencies in Russia characterises addictive behaviour as the tendency to escape from reality by means of changing one’s mental condition.

This can be done in two basic ways: pharmacologically through the consumption of psychoactive substances and non-pharmacologically through concentration on certain objects and activities that are accompanied by subjectively pleasurable emotional states.

Behavioral addiction, which is sometimes referred to as impulse control disorders, are increasingly recognized as treatable forms of addictions. The type of behaviors which some people have identified as being addictive include gambling, food, sex, viewing of pornography, use of computers, playing video games, use of the internet, work, exercise, spiritual obsession (as opposed to religious devotion), cutting, and shopping.

When analyzing the addiction to food for example, a published study in 2009 from The Scripps Research Institute have shown for the first time that the same molecular mechanisms that drive people into drug addiction are behind the compulsion to overeat, pushing people into obesity. In this study, scientists focused on a particular receptor in the brain known to play an important role in vulnerability to drug addiction—the dopamine D2 receptor. The D2 receptor responds to dopamine, a neurotransmitter that is released in the brain by pleasurable experiences like food or sex or drugs like cocaine.

Behavioral addictions has been proposed as a new class in DSM-5, but the only category included is gambling addiction. Internet addiction and sex addiction are included in the appendix.

The term soft addiction was coined by Judith Sewell Wright to describe activities, moods or ways of being, avoidances, and things - edible and consumable but which do not pose a grave health disease risk - rather, they have the most effect on personal time and productivity. These behaviors were profiled in a 2007 ABC News story titled Bad Habits.