Addiction

An addiction is a recurring compulsion by an individual to engage in an activity that is difficult to discontinue once the individual has commenced the activity. The term is often reserved for the abuse of substances that directly stimulate the brain, but it has been extended recently to also apply to obsessive gambling, eating and other activities. Factors that have been implicated in precipitating an addiction include: genetic, biological/pharmacological and/or social factors.

Denial

Denial is a defense mechanism in which a person is faced with a fact that is too painful to accept and rejects it instead, insisting that it is not true despite what may be overwhelming evidence. The subject may deny the reality of the unpleasant fact altogether (simple denial), admit the fact but deny its seriousness (minimisation) or admit both the fact and seriousness but deny responsibility (transference). The concept of denial is particularly important to the study of addiction.

The concept of denial is important in twelve-step programs, where the abandonment or reversal of denial forms the basis of the first, fourth, fifth, eighth and tenth steps. The ability to deny or minimize is an essential part of what enables an addict to continue his or her behavior in the face of evidence that, to an outsider, appears overwhelming. This is cited as one of the reasons that compulsion is seldom effective in treating addiction — the habit of denial remains.

Intervention

Interventions have been used to address serious personal problems, including, but not limited to, compulsive gambling, compulsive eating and other eating disorders, self-mutilation, "workaholism", tobacco smoking, alcoholism, drug abuse, and various types of poor personal health care. Interventions have also been conducted due to personal habits not as frequently considered seriously harmful, such as video game addiction, excessive television viewing, and excessive computer use.