Indeed, the tendency to overeat can be understood as the bulimia, and the desire to be on a severe diet can be called anorexia. However, as regards the alcohol addiction we can speak about expressly visible clinical signs and about multiple transient states. Moreover, its Majesty advertising often pushes us to admit ourselves weak to solve our problems; label ourselves first with medical or psychological problem and then look for external help. I’ve found a smart caricature of ads promotion to medicalize social problems in the following article: Saddichha, Sahoo (2010): Disease Mongering in Psychiatry. Is It Fact or Fiction? In World Medical & Health Policy 2 (1), pp. 260–277.
| If I shop too much, I suffer from compulsive shopping disorder. If I am shy, I have social phobia. If I shake my legs while I think, I have restless legs syndrome. If I am driving too fast to get somewhere, I probably have Road Rage Disorder. If I am losing hair, I am mostly stressed out and I need anxiolytics |
The question how a medical label make a confirmed addict of a drunkard we tackled above. I show all this chain here for a different reason. To interpret a problem medically or psychologically the above-mentioned book story, for example, shall be transformed to the academic language of symbols and notions of the medicine or psychology. Thus, we’re going to speak later about some psychological models of the alcohol addiction. The psychology can help push alcohol out of a human’s life only after finding the model that helps interpret the alcohol addiction phenomenon psychologically through a theory of it functioning.