[basseq]

This post sent me down a rabbit hole on entomology.

In short: words change meaning. Addition as a term includes a history of positive definition in the 17th century of "devoting oneself to another person, cause or pursuit", to being "associated with excessive alcohol use" in the early 1900s, to "linked almost exclusively to excessive patterns of substance use" in the 1980s, to the modern medical definition—not made until 2013!—of "the most severe degree of the addictive disorders, due to pervasive/excessive substance-use or behavioural compulsions/impulses".

Indeed, for most of the late 20th century, no one could agree what it referred to! "The word addiction was deliberately omitted from four consecutive editions of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders [...] because it was considered a layman’s rather than a scientific term, pejorative, stigmatizing, and too difficult to define. There were simply ‘too many meanings’ (Alexander & Schweighofer 1988); the term lacked any ‘universally agreed upon definition’ (Buchman et al. 2011); the result of using it was ‘conceptual chaos’ (Shaffer 1986, 1997)."

So it hasn't been redefined to mean anything because it was never fully defined to begin with. Only in the last decade has it truly been formalized, and yes includes both chemical and behavioral dependency.

[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/16066359.2018.1... [2] https://www.tn.gov/content/dam/tn/mentalhealth/documents/FIN...

[ls612]

Again, whatever you call it calling two very different things the same name is fundamentally dishonest. But that’s par for the course for politics.

[Kab1r]

> I’m saying addiction as a term referred to chemical dependency.

Addiction does not exclusively refer to chemical dependency.

> Now it is being redefined to mean “people doing anything I don’t like and don’t think they should do”.

I don't know where you got that impression, if that were the case then I would expect there to be widespread disagreement about what is addictive. Why is it not possible that both dependency and addictive substances are often harmful?

> Whatever you call it there is a tremendous difference in type between alcoholism or opioid dependency and social media use.

What does difference in type mean? Are we distinguishing between alcoholism and opioid dependency or between material conditions and it's presentation in social media?

> Calling them the same word is grossly misleading if not outright lying.

They do share quite a few characteristics.

[ls612]

Alcoholism (or to be more precise, alcohol dependence) is a physiological condition. Gambling ‘addiction’ is a psychological condition. That is what I mean by difference in type. No amount of self control will stop Delirium Tremens but some amount of self control can absolutely stop you from gambling. But since a dominant political ideology wants to deny self control altogether it groups these two different situations together under the same word.