I am a little bummed we didn’t really get to talk about addiction and the articles pertaining to it – so I am going to talk about them and it myself

These articles happened to be some of my favorite that we read in the entire class. I am angry with myself for not saving the links – I thought I did. I have been touched by many different addictions in many different ways. Internet addiction was certainly one of them. However; in one of the articles, Potenza made a good point about the internet being a medium and not an activity in and of itself with his notion that if you are spending your time on the internet gambling, then perhaps you have a gambling addiction and not an internet addiction. The same could be said of shopping. This was a really important distinction to me because I, too, had kind of lumped it all together in order to blame the internet.

One of my exes was horribly addicted to online gaming – to the tune of staying up for days at a time, not taking showers, having piles of food, drinks, wrappers, dishes, empty soda cans all over his desk. He was incapable of holding down a job. He wouldn’t even help me by watching my son during the day so I could work and not have the added expense of daycare. Not to mention, I couldn’t actually trust him to actually watch him, even if he agreed to. He never helped clean the apartment. It was an absolute disaster: the apartment, and my/our life. He refused to acknowledge that he had a problem and even went as far as to say that his gaming was beneficial for him. It caused endless fights.

Reading these articles, I began thinking about science’s quest of perfection in scientific explanation of things. I sometimes feel like the rigidity of scientifically defining phenomena in the world hinders the ability to help: when you have to wait for something to appear in the DSM before it can be treated; when something has to be scientifically tested for years and years before it has a hope of making it into the DSM. When people can recognize that there is a problem that needs treated, they don’t always need experiments to tell them that. Sometimes it’s plain impossible to define problems, like with internet vs alcohol – there is no hard/quantitative definition for internet. The problem with trying to define things can often be context. Science doesn’t leave room for context. In its quest for absolution, it doesn’t leave room for grey areas. It is impossible to account for every single possible situation when coming up with an operational definition of something, which means that things that really are something, can’t be called or treated as such because they aren’t covered under the operational definition.

Science likes to make official operational definitions and to reduce things down to numbers. Operational definitions can prove troublesome when you are trying to define things that can’t fully be defined and applied across the board. Reducing humans into numerical representations leaves out a lot of really important information.

Say you have a group of people and you are going to measure them all on the Beck Depression inventory and run some statistics to show who is high or low in depression. You do 1 standard deviation above and 1 standard deviation below the mean, split them in 2 groups, and then use a new type of clinical technique to work with them. You are basically giving everyone the same type of treatment based on a number that you have reduced them down to, you have high and low, but you don’t know WHY they are depressed in the first place. The WHY is just as important, possibly even more so, when it comes to the success of treating depression. The same can be said for addiction.