Psychology/Sociology
Book Details

What’s Wrong with Addiction?

Helen Keane

What’s Wrong with Addiction? shows that most of our ideas about addiction take certain ideals of health and normality for granted.

Opinion

‘ . . . this scholarship has opened up a whole new way of understanding how society attributes meaning to particular acts or behaviours.’ (Desmond Manderson, Australian Book Review, September 2002)

About this Title

This is an impressive work: carefully structured, researched and written . . . a refreshingly lucid account that is both intellectually stimulating and professionally helpful.
Janet McCalman

Addicts are generally regarded with either pity or grave disapproval. But is being addicted to something necessarily bad?

These attitudes are explicit both in contemporary medical literature and in popular, self-help texts. We categorise addiction as unnatural, diseased and self-destructive. We demonise pleasure and desire, and view the addict as physically and morally damaged.

Helen Keane’s thought-provoking text examines these assumptions in a new light. In asserting that the 'wrongness' of addiction is not fixed or indeed obvious, she presents a refreshing challenge to more conventional accounts of addiction. She also investigates the notion that people can be addicted to eating, love and sex, just as they are to drugs and alcohol.

What’s Wrong with Addiction? shows that most of our ideas about addiction take certain ideals of health and normality for granted. It exposes strains in our society’s oppositions between health and disease, between the natural and the artificial, between order and disorder, and between self and other.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Introduction: What’s Wrong with Addiction?

1 The Substance of Drugs
2 Reading the Signs of Disorder: Diagnosing Dependence
3 Further and Further from the Normal World: The Addicted Self
4 Smoking, Addiction and Time
5 Disorders of Eating and the Healthy Diet: How to Eat Well
6 Sex and Love Addiction: The Ethics and Erotics of Intimacy
7 The Recovery Habit
8 Conclusion

Notes
Bibliography
Index

About the Author

Helen Keane is a research fellow at the National Centre in HIV Social Research, University of New South Wales, Sydney.

Book Preview

978-0-522-84991-2