ADDICTS ANONYMOUS

Western Society Encourages Us To Be Dependent, Whether It Be On Alcohol,
Sex Or, Especially, On Work.

Helen Wilkinson Argues We Have To Fight The Pressures And The Culture That
Creates Them

We're living a paradox in the West: we seek the good life but have created
an addictive culture which takes us away from it. We glorify and celebrate
this culture while turning a blind eye to its negative effects. This
attitude affects almost all our lives, and until we resolve the
contradiction, our search for the good life will remain elusive.

Consider alcohol. As a society, we love it. Traditional rites of passage
into adulthood are celebrated in pubs and bars. The ritual continues at
college where binge drinking is almost obligatory. For some, this continues
in adult life. For others, it slows down, but still we associate alcohol
with the good life: it is intimately associated with our leisure and pleasure.

But when the problems of an alcoholic culture disturb us, we are judgmental
and scornful. Attitudes to alcoholics have scarcely changed in 150 years.
They are stigmatised, cast out, never one of us. So when we see winos on
our streets we shake our heads at people who lack the self-restraint that
divides the alcoholic from the rest of us.

Some of us might feel pity, but we feel safe, unchallenged, because they
are not us. And because our culture has created a sense of shame about
alcoholism, we ignore or turn a blind eye to the problem of drinking all
around us - our own or that of our lovers, friends, family, co-workers. We
go into denial because the dominant message in consumer culture is that
alcohol is a richly satisfying part of our life.

There are less obvious addictions which have even more pernicious effects.
Take our attitude to work. Any balanced notion of the good life would
suggest that we should work to live, but instead we seem to have created a
culture where we live to work.

The Protestant work ethic trades on a notion of work as morally redeeming:
work is good. (New Labour does the same.) It is not hard to see how we
created a culture in which work is all-important as a source of identity.
Every day, subtly and insidiously, we glorify a workaholic culture. We
reward `presenteeism'. Many of us look down at those who leave work on
time, assuming they lack commitment. We test our co-workers on their
capacity to handle stress, letting the demands and pressures mount to see
if they can take it.

And our attitudes to those who are not part of this culture are revealing.
Those who opt out of a linear career, who refuse to play the game, are
written out of corporate history as failures. We pity the victims of early
heart attacks and feel embarrassed around those who have nervous
breakdowns, dismissing them as failures or weak. We blame the individuals,
rather than the cultures. Only rarely do we ask whether a work culture that
puts people under such unhealthy pressures is sustainable, or desirable.

There are many more addictions. In the US, which prides itself on excess,
almost any form of indulgent (or self-denying) be-haviour now has a label.
Browse in a big bookshop there, and you will see the rows of self-help
books, about addictions and compulsive behaviours: drug addicts,
shop-aholics, leisureholics, email addicts, exercise bulimics as well as
ordinary bulimics.

We are also addicted to celebrity culture, as onlookers and as insiders.
Princess Diana paid a heavy price for her own media addiction (and ours).
Politics can be a drug: the power, the media and the status are a quick
fix. There is also sex addiction. The confessions of celebrities like
Michael Douglas have brought this compulsion to light and allowed
commentators to pathologise (and excuse) Bill Clinton's sexual
misjudgments, and to misrepresent Monica Lewinsky as a disturbed young
woman, addicted to love.

Some addictions are more serious than others: retail therapy is trivial if
it keeps you from cocaine. But the range and scope of unhealthy and
dysfunctional behaviour seem to be increasing.

It is unsurprising that the US leads the experiments with solutions. Having
a therapist is part of the lifestyle package, as are confessions to almost
total strangers. In New York or San Francisco, almost everyone you meet
owns up immediately to having one or more addictions (most harmless), and
many readily admit to having or wanting a therapist. Unlike the UK, which
is still in a `shame culture'. The confessional spirit is inhibited here,
although it is beginning to gain a voice.

Therapy can itself become as addictive as any other activity or drug
(perhaps we should label it therapy addiction). And as any therapist will
tell you, people who have denied feelings for so long go through a
vulnerable (and tedious) phase of `confessionalism'. They suddenly,
indiscriminately, confess feelings to almost anyone.

Once their guard has been dropped in the safety of the therapist's room,
they retreat to childlike innocence. Like Humpty Dumpty, they have to find
the fragments of themselves and put them back again. This is not just a
stop/start process; it is also a volatile one. Emotionalism and
confessionalism are fine in the safety of the therapist's room, but such
confessions can leave people unprotected and vulnerable.

There is a danger that the therapeutic process can feed this dependence as
the individual signs over power (and responsibility) to the therapist, and
the process runs the risk of replacing a shame with a blame culture. The
answer is to encourage the individual to `own' his or her own recovery,
rather than rely on professionals. Hence the growth of `recovery' culture.
Alcoholics Anonymous, having started as a meeting in one house, has become
a worldwide movement, and has spawned Narcotics Anonymous, Overeaters
Anonymous, Bulimics Anonymous, Workaholics Anonymous and Artists Anonymous
(for blocked artists). Recovery culture is pervasive. I was made aware of
this within weeks of arriving in New York last autumn, when I came across
an article about Barry Manilow, in which he described himself as a
`recovering celebrity'.

For the addictive personality, the challenge is to switch from unhealthy
addictions to healthier ones - from Prozac to St John's wort, from a bottle
of scotch or a bottle of wine to a bottle of orange juice, from a box of
chocolates to a bar of chocolate to no chocolate. But the road to recovery
is long and the process can become addictive. As one man in recovery said
to me: `I don't want to spend as much time in self-help groups as I spent
drinking and drugging.' He has a point.

For many struggling individuals, though, therapy and self-help groups are
part of the answer. This may be a route to personal salvation, but as a
social solution, such self-help programmes fall short. For they deal with
effects, not causes. They involve taking remedial action when a problem or
an addiction has become unmanageable, but they don't stop it from
developing in the first place.Whatever the addiction or vice, alcoholism,
workaholism etc, the culture that condones it is the cause of the problem.
So if we are to tackle the causes of our own addictions, we need to look at
the addictive culture. Then, collectively, we need to take steps to recover.

What role can and should politicians play? What recovery programme can and
should a government take to change the culture which sustains addictive
behaviour? The first step is to recognise that the key to `the good life'
lies in balance and integration - between our personal and professional
lives, between our working and our family life, between our material and
spiritual lives.

We have to recognise that this lack of balance distorts our perspective on
life, and sets us up for dysfunctional behaviour: the way we love, the way
we work, the way we use drink or drugs. And we have to identify the
pressures which promote an addictive culture - consumerism, materialism,
presenteeism. We have to introduce policies, such as parental leave and
flexible working, which promote balance and integration and minimise the
desire for the quick fix.

And we also have to recognise that, for some, it is the tyranny of too
much, rather than too little, time which is debilitating. Unemployment and
underemployment cause isolation, depression and disconnection, which foster
an unhealthy dependence on addictive cultures. The Government should foster
a sense of self-worth by providing meaningful work and promoting a debate
on what we mean by `worthwhile work'. If we valued caring in our
communities more, we could shift away from paid employment as the source of
all meaning.

We also must recognise that the boundaries between our private and public
lives, the personal and the political, are being redrawn. The Government
should audit its own addictive culture of workaholism, which pervades
West-minster and Whitehall. By modernising the working hours of the House
of Commons and ministerial departments, the Government could set the tone
for a healthier workplace culture for the nation. But it must also educate
through personal example.

One day at a time, one move at a time . . . but the recovery programme must
go on. For although the addictive culture seems glamorous, it is
dysfunctional. It sets up a vision of the good life only to take it away.
It promises the immediate high, but it cannot sustain it. It sets up a
fantasy life which falls far short of the authentic good life. And while as
individuals we can confront the corrosive effects of this in our personal
lives, we must look to politics to overturn the addictive cultures that we,
as a society, have created.

Checked-by: Richard Lake