A winning addiction

We hear a lot about substance abuse, about drink and drugs addictions that many young people nowadays experience.

We talk openly about them but often deny them when it comes closer to our home.

These are serious and worrying addictions that must be addressed, though, as has been previously stated, the really important thing is to determine what causes people to turn to such addictions.

When it is an addiction, which is generally far more prevalent than many would like to believe, action needs to be taken, fast and strong.

Addiction has been defined as “compulsive, chronic, physiological or psychological need for a habit-forming substance, behaviour, or activity having harmful physical, psychological, or social effects”.

The often-ignored words there are ‘behaviour’ and ‘activity’; addiction is not simply about substances but about anything that leads to a negative or harmful habit.

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These addictions may well have negative dangerous consequences: “Behavioural addiction is a compulsion to engage in rewarding non-substance-related behaviours.”

A dependence is formed by such providing temporary emotional relief.

That means therefore that it is not simply drinks and drugs that are addictive; many are equally addicted to sex or stealing.

 There are many addictions that we might take rather jokingly, such as addiction to chocolates or to shopping (and maybe even work fits in there), while there are others that we look at disbelievingly and disparagingly, such as self-inflicted bee stings (yes, check it out!) or eating all sorts of strange and disgusting objects (from glass to pulled-out hair).

And did we mention body-piercing and tattoos…?

There are others that are particularly worrying, especially with regard to our children in education.

Gaming has become a massive problem, where children are glued to their ‘machines’ for hours and hours (literally) on end; they wake up and have to go onto their games, which often have no direct link to their real life.

They are addicted by the irresistible new identity they can import, revel in no responsibility or consequences and by creating their own avatar they take on the role of a god.

A harmless game becomes a serious addiction – an escape like all the other addictions.

We may well be quick to see there is very little difference between gaming and gambling, in both spelling and in action; both start small but hook the person in with potential glory and increasing intensity.

It is playing with their lives without their realising it.

 Gaming, however, leads on to another similar, potentially harmful addiction that is rarely spoken about: winning!

Gaming is about winning but so too, it appears, has school sport.

School teams have to win if they are to promote the school well; they have to beat their opponents and so will go to all lengths to achieve it, starting small (an extra practice here and there before a particular fixture, soon becoming more than one extra practice) leading to offering scholarships to better players, then to using overage players or players not attending the school or taking performance-enhancing drugs.

Why do schools have to do this? They cannot accept or face failure or defeat, it would seem.

We see other schools doing something which leads to us losing so we adopt a similar tactic.

We do not mention defeats but boldly announce victories. We cannot face losing; we have to win.

Can we treat triumph and disaster the same, as the poet Kipling appeals?

Such a claim, that winning is an addiction, fits the description of a “compulsive, chronic, physiological or psychological need for a habit-forming substance, behaviour, or activity having harmful physical, psychological, or social effects”.

There are indeed harmful effects to winning. So, gaming has now been overtaken by winning.

 Winning must not become an addiction.

The strong lesson is we cannot gamble with our children’s lives; we may not have understood the severity of our children’s involvement in gaming but we are even more likely not to have seen that winning can become an addiction.

Is winning an addiction? Ask the question the lady in ‘The Knight’s Tale’ film tells her suitor: “If you love me, lose!” Can we lose? Must we win?

Addiction is an abduction; we are kidnapping our children and kidding ourselves if we do not understand that.