The Myth of the "Addictive Personality"
I repeatedly hear an argument that negates the problem of compulsive online gameplay that goes something like this: "People who play like game addicts have addictive personalities. They become addicted to anything. If you take the game away from them they will just become addicted to something else. Isn't it better to have them addicted to games than to drugs?"
So lets see, if you're born an addict you're going to live an out of control life, there's little you can do about it, and playing games is better than shooting up drugs?
This is silly. And wrong.
Aside from my work as an elf, I'm also a therapist who has been working with addicts of all sorts since the late 1980s (please note my title elven elder - I'm older than I look). I know a thing or two about addiction. While there do seem to be genetic predispositions to developing addictions (this has been studied primarily in regards to alcoholism), and some whose biological systems are more prone to developing chemical dependenies, there is no such thing as one "addictive personality." There are numerous personality disorders that have been well defined in the psychiatric Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) used by mental health professionals, and some of those personality disorders are more prone to compulsive behaviors, impulse control disorders and the abuse of substances. But there is no one "addictive personality." It's a lot more complicated than that.
Science has lagged behind technology in understanding what all is going on with compulsive computer gaming. We have a lot of theories but not a lot of good research yet. People are starting to work on it, and while I don't think anyone will deny that "some people play too much" (yeah, like maybe a lot of people?) to say "it's these addictive personalities who are at fault" is basically nonsense. The majority of people I've worked with who have played too much do not - and have not - displayed other addictive behaviors.
So let's throw that one right out the window and look a little bit deeper.
That's exactly the point of my film.
1 comments:
Well said! The idea of an addicitive personality, which dooms a person to a life without control of one's behavior is way too defeatist and fatalistic. People are learning animals. They don't come pre-programed to be addicts any more than they they are to be doctors. From birth people learn to get their needs met by trying new behaviors and using the ones that work over and over again. People may appear to replace one addictive behavior pattern with another, as if it were driven by an underlying personality type, but what drives that repetitive addictive behavior is that it is familiar and similar to a behavior that satisfied a need before. If people learn new skills, and new behaviors that are equally satisfying but don't have the negative consequences of addictive behaviors, they are perfectly capable of not repeating the old pattern. People seem to forget, everything they know now they learned, and much of what they used to know has been replaced several times with new knowledge that was more useful to them.
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