9 ms·

There's an entire new field on behavioral addiction now and lots of current and past research in the field. You're just out of date.

superkuh 3y ago
I think you're mistaking privately run "internet addiction treatment" centers and the like for actual medical science published in journals. In reality they're more like the "treatment" camps for homosexual people: scams designed to prey on people's fear and ignorance with no science backing besides third tier pay for publish journals.
- kelipso 3y ago
  You're really out of date. See wiki https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_addiction https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_addiction. Dopamine Nation by Anna Lambke (Chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic at Stanford University) is a good pop sci intro. Plenty of other published research.
  - superkuh 3y ago
    That's an edutainment book written for profit (https://www.annalembke.com/events https://www.annalembke.com/events) by someone who's income depends on fearmongering and getting interviewed/giving paid talks. Especially the title, "Dopamine Nation" and the abstracts I've read. It harkens back to the 1970s when people still mistakenly believed that dopaminergic populations were responsible for the perceptions of pleasure in the brain. Those are implemented by glutamergic populations in the shell of the nucleus accumbens and ventral pallidum. Anyone writing a book about dopaminergic pleasure is still in the 1970s. Dopaminegic populations encode for wanting, not liking, and predict reward (necessary but not sufficiently encoded in the ventral tegemental area). But they are not reward. I'm not out of date. I read journal articles on this every week and have for the last 20 years.
    - kelipso 3y ago
      You seem to have a very narrow definition of what addiction is. Considering how similarly people with behavioral and drug addictions act and how similarly the brain reacts to drug and non-drug addictions, your definition is much too narrow and yes, out of date. Plenty of research in this topic, not just Lembke, see https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3139704/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3139704/ for example.
      - superkuh 3y ago
        Another single author paper. But at least he's citing Robinson and Berridge, 2008, that's solid work. But then it goes on to try to say any changes in the brain (he phrases it as neuroplasticity) are addiction indicators. But that's simply not true. He should re-visit Berridge (who does actual science and not just meta-studies) and look at more recent work on incentive salience and teasing apart the mechanisms of liking vs wanting.
        kelipso 3y ago
        So you would like to basically define addiction only if the brain uses the wanting mechanism instead of the liking mechanism. Which is ridiculous, since people act very similarly whether the wanting mechanism is used or not. It's basically a silly little definitional thing to exclude an entire class of addictions, even though people in both classes act very similarly.
Aerroon 3y ago
And what has the field yielded? Are there actual effective addiction treatments now? Can we even tell whether somebody is addicted in a non-subjective way? All they seem to have done is try to make video game enthusiasm into a mental illness. Of course there's no real treatment for it other than "just don't" either.
- ceejayoz 3y ago
  > And what has the field yielded? Are there actual effective addiction treatments now? For food, gastric bypass does. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gastric_bypass_surgery#Physiology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gastric_bypass_surgery#Physiol... "For example, it is still widely perceived that gastric bypass works by mechanical means, i.e. food restriction and/or malabsorption. Recent clinical and animal studies, however, have indicated that these long-held inferences about the mechanisms of Roux-en-Y gastric bypass (RYGB) may not be correct. A growing body of evidence suggests that profound changes in body weight and metabolism resulting from RYGB cannot be explained by simple mechanical restriction or malabsorption. One study in rats found that RYGB induced a 19% increase in total and a 31% increase in resting energy expenditure, an effect not exhibited in vertical sleeve gastrectomy rats. In addition, pair-fed rats lost only 47% as much weight as their RYGB counterparts. Changes in food intake after RYGB only partially account for the RYGB-induced weight loss, and there is no evidence of clinically significant malabsorption of calories contributing to weight loss. Thus, it appears RYGB affects weight loss by altering the physiology of weight regulation and eating behavior rather than by simple mechanical restriction or malabsorption." > Can we even tell whether somebody is addicted in a non-subjective way? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yale_Food_Addiction_Scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yale_Food_Addiction_Scale

superkuh 3y ago

I think you're mistaking privately run "internet addiction treatment" centers and the like for actual medical science published in journals. In reality they're more like the "treatment" camps for homosexual people: scams designed to prey on people's fear and ignorance with no science backing besides third tier pay for publish journals.

kelipso 3y ago
You're really out of date. See wiki https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_addiction https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_addiction. Dopamine Nation by Anna Lambke (Chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic at Stanford University) is a good pop sci intro. Plenty of other published research.
- superkuh 3y ago
  That's an edutainment book written for profit (https://www.annalembke.com/events https://www.annalembke.com/events) by someone who's income depends on fearmongering and getting interviewed/giving paid talks. Especially the title, "Dopamine Nation" and the abstracts I've read. It harkens back to the 1970s when people still mistakenly believed that dopaminergic populations were responsible for the perceptions of pleasure in the brain. Those are implemented by glutamergic populations in the shell of the nucleus accumbens and ventral pallidum. Anyone writing a book about dopaminergic pleasure is still in the 1970s. Dopaminegic populations encode for wanting, not liking, and predict reward (necessary but not sufficiently encoded in the ventral tegemental area). But they are not reward. I'm not out of date. I read journal articles on this every week and have for the last 20 years.
  - kelipso 3y ago
    You seem to have a very narrow definition of what addiction is. Considering how similarly people with behavioral and drug addictions act and how similarly the brain reacts to drug and non-drug addictions, your definition is much too narrow and yes, out of date. Plenty of research in this topic, not just Lembke, see https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3139704/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3139704/ for example.
    - superkuh 3y ago
      Another single author paper. But at least he's citing Robinson and Berridge, 2008, that's solid work. But then it goes on to try to say any changes in the brain (he phrases it as neuroplasticity) are addiction indicators. But that's simply not true. He should re-visit Berridge (who does actual science and not just meta-studies) and look at more recent work on incentive salience and teasing apart the mechanisms of liking vs wanting.
      - kelipso 3y ago
        So you would like to basically define addiction only if the brain uses the wanting mechanism instead of the liking mechanism. Which is ridiculous, since people act very similarly whether the wanting mechanism is used or not. It's basically a silly little definitional thing to exclude an entire class of addictions, even though people in both classes act very similarly.

Aerroon 3y ago

And what has the field yielded? Are there actual effective addiction treatments now? Can we even tell whether somebody is addicted in a non-subjective way? All they seem to have done is try to make video game enthusiasm into a mental illness. Of course there's no real treatment for it other than "just don't" either.

ceejayoz 3y ago
> And what has the field yielded? Are there actual effective addiction treatments now? For food, gastric bypass does. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gastric_bypass_surgery#Physiology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gastric_bypass_surgery#Physiol... "For example, it is still widely perceived that gastric bypass works by mechanical means, i.e. food restriction and/or malabsorption. Recent clinical and animal studies, however, have indicated that these long-held inferences about the mechanisms of Roux-en-Y gastric bypass (RYGB) may not be correct. A growing body of evidence suggests that profound changes in body weight and metabolism resulting from RYGB cannot be explained by simple mechanical restriction or malabsorption. One study in rats found that RYGB induced a 19% increase in total and a 31% increase in resting energy expenditure, an effect not exhibited in vertical sleeve gastrectomy rats. In addition, pair-fed rats lost only 47% as much weight as their RYGB counterparts. Changes in food intake after RYGB only partially account for the RYGB-induced weight loss, and there is no evidence of clinically significant malabsorption of calories contributing to weight loss. Thus, it appears RYGB affects weight loss by altering the physiology of weight regulation and eating behavior rather than by simple mechanical restriction or malabsorption." > Can we even tell whether somebody is addicted in a non-subjective way? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yale_Food_Addiction_Scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yale_Food_Addiction_Scale