Basic B*tch

Declan Lynch’s tales of addiction

The pointlessness of crying alone

In writing about gambling, I have made the point that online gambling should be seen not just as a kind of an upgrade on real-world gambling, but as a new addiction. One that is so much more powerful, so much more attractive in so many ways, we can say that such a thing has not existed before.

And therefore we don’t know where we are going with it; we don’t even know what is happening with it, at present. How could we know, when it is largely conducted in private, even in secret, in transactions known only to the punter and the online bookie?

Certainly some of these transactions become widely known when we read of some spectacular case of self-destruction; usually large fraud, which has brought an addicted gambler to the attention of the gardai, and possibly to jail.

But really, we have no idea yet of the true scale of this new addiction — indeed, while some of us have been trying to raise awareness of it, the betting corporations have been working incessantly to raise unawareness, so that gambling in general is still widely regarded as being a bit of a laugh, even a form of family entertainment, without much of a dark side.

So if the ‘authorities’ are only starting to get their heads around it as an addiction in the ‘old’ sense; it will be some time yet before they get around to seeing it as a new thing altogether.

Which it is, without a doubt. Anything that has the potential to be addictive, and that is driven by the mechanisms of the internet, is hitting you in ways that were largely unknown in their real-world equivalent. Shopping online is essentially different to the kind that required you to leave the house, in the same way that email feels fundamentally different to the snail mail.

But the idea that these are new addictions is not just an acknowledgment that the internet in general is consuming our spirits with its monstrous power, it is also leading to the realisation that we have almost no idea how to confront these new forces, to deal with them as we have tried to deal with the ‘old’ addictions.

When I am writing about alcoholism or other forms of drug abuse, I am aware that there are long-established and effective forms of treatment, that there are fellowships, that there is a body of literature on the subject, and that the addiction hasn’t changed in its essence — you still can’t actually drink online, or smoke dope online; there is no ‘new’ hypercharged version of it out there, waiting to be unleashed. Not yet, anyway.

I am also aware that in treatment, you may find that you learn things about yourself that you didn’t know, you may start to gain an insight into why you became addicted to alcohol or drugs, when others didn’t — you may come to understand that you were defenceless against these things due to some problem in your family, or in yourself, or you may decide it was just the luck of the draw.

Whatever it is, there are ways in which you can trace it all back, to the places where you suspect it may have started — and even if you can find nothing that is of any use to you there, you can still get on with your recovery in whatever way is right for you.

With online gambling, or just online addiction in general, I suspect that the sources of the problem are becoming virtually untraceable beyond the activity itself, that the gambling and the gaming websites and Facebook and Twitter and eBay are designed to be so addictive, you don’t need much of a pre-existing condition to get yourself hooked — in the use of our phones and iPads and laptops, many of us are finding that simply to be in possession of one, is to be addicted.

That is new.

“...designed to be so addictive, you don’t need a pre-existing condition to get hooked”