Give me excess of it

There is a joke about a retired colonel whose aberrant behaviour had him referred to a psychoanalyst. He emerged from the session fuming. ‘Damn fool says I’m in love with my umbrella. Bloody nonsense.’ Long pause, then: ‘I’m fond of it of course.’ Quite so, and likewise while people may not actually fall in love with their iPhone, 18 out of 200 students surveyed at Stanford University admitted to ‘patting’ the little thing. They may be as uncomfortable without it as an alcoholic in need of a drink before opening time.

The Fix is a fascinating and at times alarming study of addiction. Damian Thompson writes with the authority of experience reinforced by wide-ranging research. He is a non-drinking alcoholic who has also been addicted to prescription drugs and, less damagingly, to buying more CDs of classical music than he can find time to listen to. Though he attended Alcoholics Anonymous and accepts that ‘the AA fellowship kept me away from alcohol, thanks to the remarkable power of peer-group moral support and especially the support of strangers, which has its own special potency’, he even then rejected the idea that his ‘alcoholism, or any other form of addiction, was a disease’.

I think he was right to do so, while accepting that many find the concept of disease of help in enabling them to stop drinking and regain equilibrium, even happiness. So I would say: ‘If it helps you to think it a disease, then think it a disease.’

If, however, addiction, whether to alcohol, tobacco, drugs, gambling, sex, online gaming, pornography, or even iPhones and cup-cakes, isn’t a disease, what is it? Thompson has investigated the neuroscience and can tell us much about the chemistry of the brain and which parts respond to stimulation and give us ‘a high’.