Addiction Internet Overeating and Gambling

¶ … Internet Addiction a Real Thing? Konnikova addresses the growing problem of internet addiction amongst current populations. She starts with the findings from Marc Potenza, a Yale psychiatrist. Twenty years ago, he began his career treating common addictions like substance and alcohol abuse. Then as his career continued, he noticed harder to classify addictions. He mentioned trichotillomania, and those with gambling addictions. While these second class of behaviors were not considered addictions at the time, they certainly shared fundamental similarities with truly classified addictions. Truly classified addictions physically affect a person.

These other behaviors simply cannot. This is where the main difference lies. However, one of the biggest parts of addiction is the inability to stop. Substance and behavioral additions seem to also have another important component in common, some genetic basis, where genes seem to make some of these behaviors more likely. Aside from this, the article continues and moves on to internet addiction. While people do often seem to be unable to part with the various aspects of the internet, experts cannot pinpoint a clear negative consequence from it.

In essence, gamblers go in debt, those that pull out their hair become bald, but people that use the internet a lot, just use the internet. Although the writer provided an example of a patient who spiraled downward, was it the fault of the internet or the person's inability to maintain her social life? In the end, the Internet is just a medium, not an activity. People can gamble online. They can shop online. It's not the Internet itself that is causing the problem.

While later research suggested the negative effects of internet usage, it was not officially recognized as a behavioral addiction in DSM-V. Although gambling became recognized as an addiction, extreme internet usage is not and seems to affect people differently. 25% of Potenza's patients have internet related obsessions with the majority being young people. A second article that directly deals with gambling is How the brain gets addicted to gambling and begins with a person named Shirley. She's a 20-something year old who road-tripped with some friends to Las Vegas.

Within a few sentences it spiraled down from her first time gambling to trips to occasional trips to Atlantic City, to skipping work several times a week and going to newly opened casinos in Connecticut just to play blackjack and look for change in the car to pay for the toll. She went from being thing young woman with a budding career to a penniless gambling addict.

While she never stopped on her own, fate led to her being arrested after being proven guilty of stealing money from clients and she eventually realized through a support group that she had an addiction to gambling. Although gambling was not classified as a true addiction at the time, experts now realize in some cases it is. Back then in the 1980's medical professionals saw gambling as compulsive and lumped it together with other seemingly compulsive behaviors.

"The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the American Psychiatric Association (APA) officially classified pathological gambling as an impulse-control disorder- fuzzy label for a group of somewhat related illnesses that, at the time, included kleptomania, pyromania and trichotillomania" (Jabr, 2013). However, the reality is, gambling not only can be a true addiction sharing similar genetic basis as substance abuse in relation to reward seeking and impulsivity, but it also is widely available with the exceptions being Hawaii and Utah.

The same electrical activity and brain circuits are affected when it comes to gambling addiction and substance abuse such as losing sensitivity to the high. Although treatment options do exist such as cognitive-behavior therapy, 80% of those affected by gambling addiction do not seek treatment. Some strategies aim to enforce casinos to provide a voluntary self-ban and pass out gambling addiction brochures to guests. The end closes with Shirley, not 60 as a peer counselor to gambling addicts.

In the third article, Is obesity an addiction? the writer focuses on new emerging science demonstrating that while overeating may have previously been regarded as a behavioral disorder, meaning people that overeat exhibit a lack of self-control, that may not be the case. The example was given of obese rats not caring about getting a foot shock for eating the cake and the sausages.

The same results were seen in a study where rats were given cocaine and demonstrated the rats were willing to experience negative consequences just to access what they desired. Furthermore, it may also not be caused due to a hormonal imbalance. This is because it is too simplistic to suggest leptin insensitivity, or leptin imbalance leads to overeating. With foods now being visually appealing and highly satisfying, they can override the appetite-suppressing hormones and lead to addiction.

What may be causing the compulsive behavior is the foods that are rich in sugar and fat. Sugar and fat have the ability to supercharge a person's brain reward system. This can then overpower the brain's ability to notify the person to stop eating. Simply put, more eating leads to more wanting to eat. The debate then falls to if this mechanism leads to addiction and if so can that discovery lead to effective treatments. Endorphin blockers have led to a reduction in eating in rats.

Those same drugs are used to treat heroin addiction. Meaning, overeating shares similar aspects to drug addiction. Although they share so many similarities with obese people even opting for surgery to reduce eating and still falling back to overeating later on, overeating is not officially recognized as an addiction as to not classify obese individuals as 'mentally ill'. Nicotine craving experienced by tobacco users can be subsided thanks to a drug called rimonabant. Although this may prove an effective treatment for overeaters, it has dangerous side effects.

Additional research is needed to confirm if overeating is in fact an addiction and will prove to be treatable under such drugs/treatment options. Similarities 1. The first similarity from all three articles is the analysis of whether some is addictive or compulsive.

Gambling and overeating were seen as compulsive behaviors, yet when they noticed changes in brain chemistry and similar brain chemistry in those that suffer from drug addiction and substance abuse, then they started to rethink the idea of compulsion and addiction as it applied to these kinds of behaviors. 2. The second similarity is the comparison of drug addiction/substance abuse to these.