What's Wrong With Addiction

Addicts are generally regarded with either pity or grave disapproval. But is being addicted to something necessarily bad? Challenging conventional accounts of addiction, this book aims to show that most ideas about addiction take certain ideals of health and normality for granted.

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Addicts are generally regarded with either pity or grave disapproval. But is being addicted to something necessarily bad? We categorise addiction as unnatural, diseased and self-destructive. We demonise pleasure and desire, and view the addict as physically and morally damaged. In asserting that the 'wrongness' of addiction is not fixed or indeed obvious, Helen Keane 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.