It's not the morphine, it's the size of the cage: Rat Park experiment upturns conventional wisdom

[RainDog]

88. Chemical addiction and behavioral addiction

are often lumped together because "addiction" is a word that has lost its clinical meaning so often, just as the word "depression" no longer means clinical depression to many but is a catch-all term.

The only behavioral "addiction" in the DSM-V is gambling, tho I'm sure there are other behaviors that people do that meet many of the standards.

fwiw.

I don't want to get off on a tangent, but since you brought it up the recent controversy, I thought it was useful to note that there are differences between behavioral and chemical compulsions. With all due respect.

I do think there's a difference between directly ingesting a chemical to act upon the brain and mediated behaviors that can be and often are compulsive for some people. The idea of "sex addiction" is disputed by recent research, and, again, is not considered an addiction by the most recent dx standards.

http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2013/07/sex_addiction_study_ucla_researchers_find_that_sex_and_porn_might_not_actually.html

Does sex addiction really exist? A new study published in last week’s journal of Socioaffective Neuroscience and Psychology suggests that maybe it doesn’t—bad news for celebrities like Tiger Woods and Russell Brand who have made it trendy in recent years to claim a clinical addiction to sex as an explanation for sexual misbehavior.

The study (which, amazingly, is the first of its kind) measured how the brains of people who struggle with sexually compulsive behavior respond to sexual images. If sex can be addictive in the clinical sense, scientists theorized, then the neural response of sex addicts to pornography should mimic the neural responses of drug or alcohol addicts to their drugs of choice. Instead, researchers found that hypersexual brains don’t react in the same way as other addicts’ brains—in fact, the neural responses to pornography only varied based on levels of sexual libido, rather than on measures of sexual compulsivity. People with higher libidos had more active brain reactions to the sexual images than people with lower libidos, but that was the only correlation. Degrees of sexual compulsivity did not predict brain response at all. If the results of this first study can be replicated, it would represent a major challenge to the notion that sex and pornography can be literally addictive.