A Guide to Treating Symptoms of Mental and Physical Illness (continued...)
PART II: We All Live in Rat Park Now
PART II: We All Live in Rat Park Now
The cocaine-loving rat is so familiar as to be nearly a cliche by now. It’s common knowledge that rats will self-administer cocaine in experiments, according to variable or constant dispensing schedules. The rat presses a lever and a water bottle in the rat’s cage provides some water, laced with cocaine, either continuously or randomly (depending on the experiment’s goals). Rats will famously self-administer cocaine until they die. They won’t overdose (the doses in the water aren’t that high). Instead they will forego food and sleep and activity until they are so exhausted that the stimulant effect of the cocaine overwhelms their organs and they expire.
What is less well-known, but should, in my opinion, be required instruction for every high school student in the United States (along with the fundamentals of nutrition, the concept of compounding interest, and some basic ideas of Greco-Roman philosophers like Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius) is the result of the extensive ‘Rat Park’ series of experiments. Perhaps I will write more about these trials later, but for now I will just give the most general and pointed conclusion of Rat Park: when rats are given toys and environmental stimulation and the company of other rats they ignore their drug dispensers. They behave in accordance with the natural habits of any healthy rat. Addiction is not simply a matter of substances or behaviors which super-activate the reward pathway. That is the pull element. The push element is very simple: it’s pain. It’s not physical pain so much as it’s emotional pain and denial of outlets and goals and chronic stress. People can become physically dependent upon opiates after surgery, certainly. They don’t become addicts though, unless their brain is malformed and predisposed to the obsessive thinking and delusional rationalizations which grow slowly and quietly as the compulsion is repeatedly satisfied. The pain which feeds human addiction is in the mind: it’s loneliness and trauma and aimlessness.
Rats, on their way to work on a Monday morning.
We know that drug and alcohol addiction in humans is about 50% genetic and that environmental factors (trauma, prolonged stress) can be major contributing factors. Most people would not become drug addicts or alcoholics even if they were dosed with morphine and ethanol every day for years. Their body would become physically addicted and their mind would experience severe depression and discomfort in the event of cessation of use, but they would not develop the obsession and delusions which are the defining feature of true addiction. They would experience (in the morphine patient’s case) 1-3 weeks of flu-like symptoms and possibly a longer stretch of sleeplessness and pain sensitivity and low mood… and then they would move on and never crave morphine again. An addict, by comparison, will try a drug once or a few times and sometimes the craving and self-deceptions will start immediately (although they’re extremely trivial at first-they generally only become “insane” once the body has begun to develop physical dependency). So, humans are not rats. Some of us have a predisposition to addiction in our very DNA - but the addictions described so far (drugs and alcohol, to which we can add sex and gambling and maybe a few others) are serious, stigmatized, and harmful.
There’s a lower tier of addictions to which almost everyone is susceptible. If the working definition of addiction is uncontrolled indulgence in an activity despite known and repeated potential negative consequences, how are we to think of the +100 million American adults who see the effects of processed carbs and sugar on their waistlines and feel it in their pancreas but continue to indulge on the order of 500-2000 daily excess calories, often until death? What percentage of diabetes patients ignore medical device until their blood vessels are scarred and shrunken, and their limbs start necrotizing? What else but addiction can we call the compulsive and depressing use of social media platforms, especially for girls and young women? The data is in: the damage is real. Yet indulgence in this risky and harmful activity is close to universal in the developed world. Isn’t this also addiction?
The only reasons that drug and alcohol dependencies are considered medical conditions and compulsive ingestion of sugar is not involve the long, shallow arc of damage and the less dramatic social effects of over-eating, and (especially) the universality of the behavior. If everyone is an addict then no one is, so it’s completely appropriate that the label be reserved for the most severe and abnormal cases.
Nevertheless, over-eating and compulsive shopping and habitual daily social media use hack into the brain’s reward pathways to nudge us toward behaviors that are cumulatively harmful and in many cases deadly. Just as with the stimulated rats, it’s not simply the dopamine release of these activities which drive us to indulge. It’s also the artificial and overly-comfortable shapes of our modern lives, the degradation of meaning and identity and purpose for many adults, and the loneliness of modernity. We are the loneliest society that has ever existed, by far. Combine that with the loss of satisfying paid work for millions of men and the erosion of communities by structural economic shifts and lifestyle technologies and there is no mystery as to why addiction is endemic in the U.S. The softer and more gradual addictions already described are universal. We all suffer from them to some extent. For many millions of Americans they are severely limiting and dangerously unhealthy. Most importantly: they’re getting worse.
Our entire world is a kind of rat park experiment, and our cage is increasingly barren and bereft of companionship or toys or healthy activity. The distractions and comforts of modernity don’t address the deep longings of the human spirit. Too often they only offer more avenues for addiction, because that addiction generates profit for large companies.