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Comment by bpatrianakos | Hacker News Reader

Depends on your definition of addiction. Addiction is a real medical disease. To be addicted in the medical sense you have to a) have a dependence on the object of your addiction (your body has a negative response when you don't get the thing you're addicted to) and b) it changes your behavior and causes extreme negative consequences in your life. Things like Internet addiction only account for one half of that. I think that if the statement "you can be addicted to anything" can be true then either the definition of addiction your using is too broad or it needs redefining.

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I'm just going to drop a link to a short essay on what exactly constitutes a disease: http://lesswrong.com/lw/2as/diseased_thinking_dissolving_que...

  > Summary
  >
  > People commonly debate whether social and mental 
  > conditions are real diseases. This masquerades as a 
  > medical question, but its implications are mainly social 
  > and ethical. We use the concept of disease to decide who 
  > gets sympathy, who gets blame, and who gets treatment.
  >
  > Instead of continuing the fruitless "disease" argument, 
  > we should address these questions directly. Taking a 
  > determinist consequentialist position allows us to do so 
  > more effectively. We should blame and stigmatize people 
  > for conditions where blame and stigma are the most useful 
  > methods for curing or preventing the condition, and we 
  > should allow patients to seek treatment whenever it is 
  > available and effective.

I didn't read the wiki page before posting but it clearly states that "virtually any activity or substance" has the potential to be addictive.

However, psychological dependence may be more accurate for many behaviors.

The word "addiction" is usually used for things that fulfill either of those two criteria. That's why you typically talk about physiological dependence or psychological dependence if you're actually treating it.

How about my dependence on air to breath and food to eat? I think you also need to add the requirement that the dependence is not common, and causes problems for the person that fall outside the norm.

Those are innate dependencies, and almost all definitions of a dependence disorder include that the dependence must cause social, occupational, or recreational issues.

Check out the DSM4 criteria for substance dependence[1], but note that it has been phased out in the DSM5. They merged it with substance abuse to form "Substance Use Disorder."

[1] http://www.buppractice.com/node/454

[2] http://www.buppractice.com/node/4621

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