[FRIAM] Addiction and depression

[Jochen Fromm]

The hijack metaphor is not uncommon. Judson Brewer writes in his book "The Craving Mind" (Yale University Press, 2017) that drugs hijack the dopamine reward system. He defines addiction as the continued use of a particular substance or specific behavior, despite adverse consequences.The food giants have apparently found ways to hijack the reward system too. They have made their products addictive and their profits larger, as Michael Moss writes in his book "Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us" (Random House, 2013).One could say that the food giants exploit our reward system for their profits in the same way that despotic rules exploit our emotions to stay in power, for instance by promising protection against an imagined threat ("The country is not safe! I will make it safe" as Judson Brewer writes in the epilogue of his book).-J.
-------- Original message --------From: steve smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> Date: 6/15/24  6:15 PM  (GMT+01:00) To: friam at redfish.com Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Addiction and depression 
    I'm probably behind the times with pop-lingo but I was caught by
      a new (to me) phrase of "limbic hijack".
    I'm left wondering what the adaptive value of this (apparent)
      exaptation is?   My interests have been focused about the
      competition between individual (human) organismal adaptation and
      societal and even biospheric scale collective adaptation...   
    
    Mob responses (BLM protests, Capitol Invasion, ...) and
      collective down-regulation of collective "bad behaviour" (e.g.
      economic recessions/depressions as a self-regulating response to
      unbound growth/exploitation?)
    My personal experience with addiction/depression is limited but
      not absent.  I have experienced depression almost exclusively as
      the "rain shadow" (nod to Nick and SG) of anxiety... where some
      threat (real or imagined) exhausts me to the point of a depressive
      response (which almost always breaks the anxiety and enforces a
      rest/recovery phase).   Addiction is slipperier for me as I don't
      know that most of us recognize our addictions while we are
      indulging in them, or in their "thrall".   Most here might not be
      surprised that one of my more self-recognized addictions is
      "ideaphoresis",  or getting high on my own supply of never-ending
      tangential ideas.  This would fit your (Jochen) idea of
      dysregulated otherwise adaptive phenomena...  wild ideation as a
      form of forced breadth-first exploration of problem space, up to
      and including making up problems that *might* but don't clearly
      yet exist.   I noticed this (making up problems that don't exist)
      first with my fascination with Post-Apocalyptic fiction.
    Regarding food addiction, most of my life I had an
      addictive/compulsive response to lowered electrolytes of seeking
      salty food or more notably salting my icewater.   After decades of
      puzzling over this (often there was no obvious reason like
      exercise/persperation) I had someone suggest that my craving
      wasn't for sodium chloride but rather other electrolytes.  I
      picked up some liquid magnesium and potassium based
      salt-substitute to add to any drink (formerly water, now
      home-brewed kombucha) if I ever feel the slightest salt craving. 
      It clears it immediately... and I notice that the mineralized
      kombucha tastes a great deal like coconut water (which is
      specifically high in potassium) which was another craving I knew
      before I discovered the mineral-electrolyte supplements.   I have
      shifted my diet over the last few years to foods which are also
      potassium/magnesium rich in the process for other reasons and my
      background taste for salt is almost absent.
    
    On 6/15/24 8:22 AM, Jochen Fromm wrote:
    
    
      
      
        I was reading a
            book about addictions (Addictions - A Social Psychological
            Perspective edited by Catalina E. Kopetz and Carl W. Lejuez,
            Routledge, 2015) and was wondering if addiction and
            depression are two extremes on the same spectrum. Addiction
            is in a sense the opposite of depression: we feel either
            forced to do something or compelled to do nothing. We either
            can not stop doing something or can not do anything at all.
        
        Rock stars and
            rich people or their kids often suffer from drug addiction
            to alcohol or cocaine or other drugs, while ordinary people
            are more affected from junk food and porn. Junk food is to
            supper time what porn is to pairing time. They hijack the
            ancient mechanisms which ensure that we maintain our bodies
            (by ingesting food) and maintain our species (by having
            sex). The reward system in our brains is triggered without
            providing the benefits the rewards were meant to guarantee.
        
        What do you
            think, could you say that addiction and depression are two
            related phenomena where inbuilt reward mechanism go awry?
        
      
      -J.
      
      
      
      
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