this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2026
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So someone doing Heroin everday is not addicted if it doesn't cause any problems in life? Clinical Addiction absolutely does have to do with how much you do something (and other factors of course).
That's a physical addiction. Drug addiction is a problem physicians handle. Psychologists handle addiction to video games, gambling, sex, the Internet, etc and that's how they define addiction.
That is simply not correct. It is true that addiction to substances ends in physical dependency. But at its core all addiction is psychological. A heroin addict doesn't relapse after two years of being sober because he's still physically addicted to it. In most cases it's about missing the capacity for emotional regulation. And people addicted to substances don't get treated by physicians, at least where I'm from.
It is correct. If you do heroin everyday, you will have physical problems. If you stop playing Team Fortress 2 and it causes you to start shaking, vomiting, and shitting your pants, then that's comparable to heroin. But you won't do that so they're not the same types of addiction. That's why the medical community defines addiction by how something affects your life and not by some arbitrary number of times you do it.
There are more than one criteria by which addiction gets defined. One of these absolutely is how often you do something. How it affects you is not the only criteria by which the medical community defines an addiction, albeit one of them.
Heroin Addiction is different to Team Fortress addiction in the same way it is different to Cannabis addiction, they are all unique in how they affect you. The physical and psychological effects of cannabis addiction are going to be different to the ones of heroin and internet addiction.
If they were only defined by how they affect you, like you argue, then every addiction would be a unique type of addiction, which is not how we define them
Again at the core all addiction is psychogical. We don't differenciate between them on basis of physical effects.