ADDICTS ANONYMOUS

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) behaviour 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, shopaholics, 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 Westminster 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.

Helen Wilkinson is project director at Demos. This is an edited
version of an essay which appears in Demos's latest collection, The
Good Life, published this week.

Checked-by: derek rea