Category Archives: Eating disorders
World of the Weird: The A-Z of strange and bizarre addictions
Today’s blog takes a brief look at some of the stranger addictions that have been written about in the academic literature (or academics that have tried to argue these behaviours can be addictive). Some of these ‘addictions’ listed are not addictions by my own criteria but others have argued they are. The papers or books that have argued the case for the cited behaviour being a type of addiction are found in the ‘Further reading’ section.
- Argentine tango addiction: A French study published in a 2013 issue of the Journal of Behavioral Addictions by Remi Targhetta and colleagues argued that a minority of 1129 Argentine tango dancers they surveyed may be addicted to dancing. In 2015, I and some of my Hungarian colleagues developed the Dance Addiction Inventory (published in PLoS ONE) and also argued that a minority of dancers (more generally) might be addicted to dance and conceptualized the behaviour as a form of exercise addiction.
- Badminton addiction: While there are many behaviours I could have chosen here including addictions to box set television watching (aka ‘box set bingeing), bargain hunting, bungee jumping, blogging, and bodybuilding, a recent 2018 paper published in NeuroQuantology by Minji Kwon and colleagues carried out a neuroimaging study on a sample 45 badminton players. Using the Korean Exercise Addiction Scale, 20% of the sample were defined as being addicted to badminton.
- Carrot eating addiction: Again, there are many behaviours I could have chosen here including alleged addictions to crypto-trading, chaos, collecting, crosswords, and cycling, there are a number of published case studies in the psychological literature highlighting individuals addicted to eating carrots including papers by Ludek Černý and Karel Černý, K. (British Journal of Addiction, 1992), and Robert Kaplan (Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 1996).
- Death addiction: A recent paper by Dr. Marc Reisinger entitled ‘Addiction to death’ in the journal CNS Spectrums attempted to argue that attraction to death be considered an addiction similar to gambling addiction. Reisinger related the concept to individuals who have left Europe to join the jihad in Syria, and outlined the case of 24-year-old French-Algerian Mohamed Merah who committed several attacks in Toulouse in 2012 and who ‘glorified’ death. Te paper claimed that this “addiction to death is taught by Salafist preachers, whose videos, readily accessible on the internet, are kind of advertisements for death, complete with depictions of soothing fountains and beautiful young girls”.
- Entrepreneurship addiction: There are a couple of papers by April Spivack and Alexander McKelvie (a 2014 paper in the Journal of Business Venturing, and a 2018 paper Academy of Management) arguing that entrepreneurship can be addictive. They define ‘entrepreneurship addiction’ as “the excessive or compulsive engagement in entrepreneurial activities that results in a variety of social, emotional, and/or physiological problems and that despite the development of these problems, the entrepreneur is unable to resist the compulsion to engage in entrepreneurial activities”. They also make the case that that entrepreneurship addiction is different from workaholism.
- Fortune telling addiction: Although I could have included addictions to financial trading or fame, a 2015 paper in the Journal of Behavioral Addictions by Marie Grall-Bronnec and her colleagues reported the case study of a woman (Helen) that was ‘addicted’ to fortune tellers. They used my addiction criteria to assess whether Helen was addicted to fortune telling, and argued that she was.
- Google Glass addiction: In previous blogs I have written on addictions to gossip and gardening (although these were based more on non-academic literature). However, a 2015 paper published by Kathryn Yung and her colleagues in the journal Addictive Behaviors, published the first (and to my knowledge) only case of addiction to Google Glass (wearable computer-aided glasses with Bluetooth connectivity to internet-ready devices. The authors claimed that their paper, (i) showed that excessive and problematic uses of Google Glasscan be associated with involuntary movements to the temple area and short-term memory problems, and (ii) highlighted that the man in their case study displayed frustration and irritability that were related to withdrawal symptoms from excessive use of Google Glass.
- Hacking addiction: Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s I wrote a number of papers on internet addiction and included ‘hacking addiction’ as a type of internet addiction. Given the criminal element of this type of internet addiction I wrote about it in criminological-based journals such as The Probation Journal (1997) and The Police Journal (2000). One of the most infamous cases that I have written about took place in London in 1993, where Paul Bedworth was accused of hacking-related crime causing over £500,000 worth of damage. On the basis of expert witness testimony, he was acquitted on the basis that he was addicted to hacking. Since then, various papers have been published arguing that hacking can be an addiction. For instance, in an in-depth interview study of 62 hackers, Siew Chan and Lee Yao used addiction as a framework to explain their participants’ behaviour (see their paper in the Review of Business Information Systems, 2005).
- Internet search addiction: Although I was tempted to go for IVF addiction, I thought I would go for ‘internet search addiction’ which basically refers to constant ‘googling’ where individuals spend hours and hours every day using online databases to go searching for things. This behaviour was first alluded to by Kimberley Young in her 1999 classification of different types of internet addiction which she called ‘information overload’ and was defined as compulsive web surfing or database searches. More recently, Yifan Wang and her colleagues developed the Questionnaire on Internet Search Dependence (QISD) published in Frontiers in Public Health (FiPH). I criticized the QISD in a response paper published in FiPH, not because I didn’t think internet search addiction didn’t exist (because theoretically it might do, even though I’ve never come across a genuine case) but because the items in the instrument had very little to do with addiction.
- Joyriding addiction: There have been a number of academic papers published on joyriding addiction. Arguably the most well-known study was published by Sue Kellett and Harriet Gross in a 2006 issue of Psychology, Crime and Law. The study comprised semi-structured interviews with 54 joyriders (aged 15 to 21 years of age) all of whom were convicted car thieves (“mainly in custodial care”). The results of the study indicated that all addiction criteria occurred within the joyriders’ accounts of their behaviour particularly ‘‘persistence despite knowledge and concern about the harmful consequences’’, ‘‘tolerance’’, ‘‘persistent desire and/or unsuccessful attempts to stop’’, “large amounts of time being spent thinking about and/or recovering from the behaviour’’ and “loss of control”. The paper also cited examples of ‘withdrawal’ symptoms when not joyriding, the giving up of other important activities so that they could go joyriding instead, and spending more time participating in joyriding than they had originally intended.
- Killing addiction: The idea of serial killing being conceptualized as an addiction in popular culture is not new. For instance, Brian Masters book about British serial killer Dennis Nilsen (who killed at least 12 young men) was entitled Killing for Company: The Story of a Man Addicted to Murder, and Mikaela Sitford’s book about Harold Shipman, the British GP who killed over 200 people, was entitled Addicted to Murder: The True Story of Dr. Harold Shipman. In Eric Hickey’s 2010 book Serial Murderers and Their Victims, Hickey makes reference to an unpublished 1990 monograph by Dr. Victor Cline who outlined a four-factor addiction syndrome in relation to sexual serial killers who (so-called ‘lust murderers’ that I examined in a previous blog). One of the things that I have always argued throughout my career, is that someone cannot become addicted to an activity or a substance unless they are constantly being rewarded (either by continual positive and/or negative reinforcement). Given that serial killing is a discontinuous activity (i.e., it happens relatively infrequently rather than every hour or day) how could killing be an addiction? One answer is that the act of killing is part of the wider behaviour in that the preoccupation with killing can also include the re-enacting of past kills and the keeping of ‘trophies’ from the victims (which I overviewed in a previous blog).
- Love addiction: In the psychological literature, the concept of love addiction has been around for some time dating back to works by Sigmund Freud. Arguably the most cited work in this area is the 1975 book Love and Addiction by Stanton Peele and Archie Brodsky. Their book suggested that some forms of love are actually forms of addiction, and tried to make the case that some forms of love addiction may be potentially more destructive and prevalent than widely recognized opiate drugs. There have also been a number of instruments developed assessing love addiction including the Love Addiction Scale (developed by Hunter, Nitschke, and Hogan, 1981), and the Passionate Love Scale (developed by Hatfield, and Sprecher, 1986).
- Muscle dysmporphia as an addiction: In a paper I published with Andrew Foster and Gillian Shorter in a 2015 issue of the Journal of Behavioral Addictions, we argued that muscle dysmorphia (MD) could be classed as an addiction. MD is a condition characterised by a misconstrued body image in individuals who interpret their body size as both small or weak even though they may look normal or highly muscular. MD has been conceptualized as a body dysmorphic disorder, an eating disorder, and/or part of the obsessive-compulsive disorder symptomatology. Reviewing the most salient literature on MD, we proposed an alternative classification of MD that we termed the ‘Addiction to Body Image’ (ABI) model. We argued the addictive activity in MD is the maintaining of body image via a number of different activities such as bodybuilding, exercise, eating specific foods, taking specific drugs (e.g., anabolic steroids), shopping for specific foods, food supplements, and/or physical exercise accessories, etc.. In the ABI model, the perception of the positive effects on the self-body image is accounted for as a critical aspect of the MD condition (rather than addiction to exercise or certain types of eating disorder). Based on empirical evidence, we proposed that MD could be re-classed as an addiction due to the individual continuing to engage in maintenance behaviours that may cause long-term harm.
- News addiction: Although I could have chosen nasal spray addiction or near death addiction, a recent 2017 paper on ‘news addiction’ was published in the Journal of the Dow University of Health Sciences Karachi by Ghulam Ishaq and colleagues. The authors used some of my papers on behavioural addiction to argue for the construct of ‘news addiction’ as a construct to be empirically investigated. The authors also developed their own 19-item News Addiction Scale (NAS) although the paper didn’t give any examples of any of the items in the NAS. In relation to personality types (and like other addictions), they found news addiction was positively correlated with neuroticism and negatively correlated with conscientiousness. Given that this is the only study on news addiction that I am aware of, I’ll need a lot more research evidence before I am convinced that it really exists.
- Online auction addiction: A number of academics have made the claim that some individuals can become addicted to participating in online auctions. In a 2004 paper on internet addiction published in American Behavioral Scientist, Kimberley Young mentioned online auction [eBay] addiction in passing. The same observation was also made in a later 2009 paper by Tonino Cantelmi and Massimo Talls in the Journal of CyberTherapy and Rehabilitation. Other researchers have carried out empirical studies including a (i) 2007 paper by Cara Peters and Charles Bodkin in the Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, (ii) 2008 paper by Chih-Chien Wang in the Proceedings of the Asia-Pacific Services Computing Conference, and (iii) 2011 study carried out by Dr. Ofir Turel and colleagues published in the MIS Quarerly. These papers indicated that those with problematic online auction use experienced (i) psychological distress, (ii) habitual usage, (iii) compulsive behaviour, (iv) negative consequences, and/or (v) dependence, withdrawal and self-regulation.
- Pinball addiction: Although I could have listed alleged addictions to plastic surgery and poetry, as far as I am aware, I am the only academic to have published a paper on pinball addiction. Back in 1992, I published a case study in Psychological Reports. My paper featured the case of a young man (aged 25 years) who (based on classic addiction criteria) was totally hooked on pinball. It was the most important thing in his life, used the behaviour to modify his moods, got withdrawal symptoms if he was unable to play pinball, had engaged in repeated efforts to cut down or stop playing pinball, and compromised all other activities in his life (education, occupation and relationships). To me, this individual had a gaming addiction but it was pinball rather than videogame addiction.
- Qat addiction: Qat (sometimes known as khat, kat, cat, and ghat) is a flowering plant traditionally used as a mild stimulant in African and Middle East countries (Somalia, Yemen, Ethiopia). Heavy qat users can experience many side effects including insomnia, anxiety, increased aggression, high blood pressure, and heart problems. There are numerous reports in the medical literature of qat addiction (see papers by Rita Manghi and colleagues in the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, and Nezar Al-Hebshi and Nils Skuag in Addiction Biology).
- Rock climbing addiction: Over the past two years, a couple of papers by Robert Heirene, David Shearer, and Gareth Roderique-Davies have looked at the addictive properties of rock climbing specifically concentrating on withdrawal symptoms and craving. In the first paper on withdrawal symptoms published in 2016 in the Journal of Behavioral Addictions, the authors highlighted some previous research suggesting that there are similarities in the phenomenology of substance-related addictions and extreme sports (in this case rock climbing). The study concluded that based on self-report, rock climbers experienced genuine withdrawal symptoms during abstinence from climbing and that these were comparable to individuals with substance and other behavioural addictions. In a second investigation just published in Frontiers in Psychology, the same team reported the development of the Rock Climbing Craving Questionnaire comprising three factors (‘positive reinforcement’, ‘negative reinforcement’ and ‘urge to climb’).
- Study addiction: I was spoilt for choice on the letter ‘S’ and could have mentioned addictions to speeding, selfie-taking, shoplifting, Sudoko, and stock market speculation. However, there are now a number of published papers on ‘study addiction’ (individuals addicted to their academic study), three of which I have co-authored (all in the Journal of Behavioral Addictions and led by my colleague Pawel Atroszko). We have conceptualised study addiction as a type of work addiction (or a pre-cursor to work addiction) and in a series of studies (including longitudinal research) we have found empirical evidence of ‘study addiction’. Italian researchers (Yura Loscalzo and Marco Giannini) have also published research on ‘overstudying’ and ‘studyholism’ too (in the journals ARC Journal of Psychiatry, 2017; Social Indicators Research, 2018).
- Tanning addiction: There is now lots of empirical research examining ‘tanorexia’ (individuals who crave tanning and spend every day on sunbeds). However, I along with my colleagues in Norway recently reconceptualised tanorexia as a ‘tanning addiction’ and developed a scale to assess it (which was recently published in a 2018 issue of the British Journal of Dermatology). Our study was the largest over study on tanning (over 23,000 participants) and our newly developed scale (the Bergen Tanning Addiction Scale) had good psychometric properties.
- Upskirting addiction: Upskirting refers to taking a photograph (typically with a smartphone) up someone’s skirt without their permission. In the UK there have been a number of high profile court cases including Paul Appleby who managed to take 9000 upskirting photos in the space of just five weeks (suggesting that he was doing it all day every day to have taken so many photos), and Andrew MacRae who had amassed 49,000 upskirt photos and videos using hidden cameras at his workplace, on trains, and at the beach. Both men avoided a custodial sentence because their lawyers argued they were addicted and/or had a compulsion to upskirting. In a 2017 issue of the Law Gazette, forensic psychologist Julia Lam made countless references to upskirting in an overview of voyeuristic disorder. Dr. Lam also talked about her treatment of upskirting voyeurs and recounted one case which she claimed was a compulsion (and who was successfully treated). The case involved a male university student who was very sport active but who masturbated excessively whenever major sporting events or important exams were imminent as a coping strategy to relieve stress.
- Virtual reality addiction: Back in 1995, in a paper I entitled ‘Technological addictions’ in the journal Clinical Psychology Forum, I asserted that addiction to virtual reality would be something that psychologists would be seeing more of in the future. Although I wrote the paper over 20 years ago, there is still little empirical evidence (as yet) that individuals have become addicted to virtual reality (VR). However, that is probably more to do with the fact that – until very recently – there had been little in the way of affordable VR headsets. (I ought to just add that when I use the term ‘VR addiction’ what I am really talking about is addiction to the applications that can be utilized via VR hardware rather than the VR hardware itself). Of all the behaviours on this list, this is the one where there is less good evidence for its existence. Perhaps of most psychological concern is the use of VR in video gaming. There is a small minority of players out there who are already experiencing genuine addictions to online gaming. VR takes immersive gaming to the next level, and for those that use games as a method of coping and escape from the problems they have in the real world it’s not hard to see how a minority of individuals will prefer to spend a significant amount of their waking time in VR environments rather than their real life.
- Water addiction: In a blog I wrote back in 2015, I recounted some press stories on individuals who claimed they were ‘addicted’ to drinking water. My research into the topic led to a case study of ‘water dependence’ published a 1973 issue of the British Journal of Addiction by E.L. Edelstein. This paper reported that the excessive drinking of water can dilute electrolytes in an individual’s brain and cause intoxication. This led me to a condition called polydipsia (which in practical terms means drinking more than three litres of water a day) which often goes hand-in-hand with hyponatraemia (i.e., low sodium concentration in the blood) and in extreme cases can lead to excessive water drinkers slipping into a coma. There are also dozens and dozens of academic papers on psychogenic polydipsia (PPD). A paper by Dr. Brian Dundas and colleagues in a 2007 issue of Current Psychiatry Reports noted that PPD is a clinical syndrome characterized by polyuria (constantly going to the toilet) and polydipsia (constantly drinking too much water), and is common among individuals with psychiatric disorders. A 2000 study in European Psychiatry by E. Mercier-Guidez and G. Loas examined water intoxication in 353 French psychiatric inpatients. They reported that water intoxication can lead to irreversible brain damage and that around one-fifth of deaths among schizophrenics below the age of 53 years are caused this way. Whether ‘water intoxication’ is a symptom of being ‘addicted’ to water depends upon the definition of addiction being used.
- X-ray addiction: OK, this one’s a little bit of a cheat but what I really wanted to concentrate on what has been unofficially termed factitious disorder (FD). According to Kamil Jaghab and colleagues in a 2006 issue of the Psychiatry journal “FD is sometimes referred to as hospital addiction, pathomimia, or polysurgical addiction”. The primary characteristic of people suffering from FD is that they deliberately pretend to be ill in the absence of external incentives (such as criminal prosecution or financial gain). It is called a factitious because sufferers feign illness, pretend to have a disease, and/or fake psychological trauma typically to gain attention and/or sympathy from other people. Again, whether such behaviours can be viewed as an addiction depends upon the definition of addiction being used.
- YouTube addiction: I unexpectedly found my research on internet addiction being cited in a news article by Paula Gaita on compulsive viewing of YouTube videos (‘Does compulsive YouTube viewing qualify as addiction?‘). The article was actually reporting a case study from a different news article published by PBS NewsHour by science correspondent Lesley McClurg (‘After compulsively watching YouTube, teenage girl lands in rehab for digital addiction’). The story profiled a student whose obsessive viewing of YouTube content led to extreme behaviour changes and eventually, depression and a suicide attempt. Not long after this, I and my colleague Janarthanan Balakrishnan published what we believe is the only ever study on YouTube addiction in the Journal of Behavioral Addictions. In a study of over 400 YouTube users we found that YouTube addiction was more associated with content creation than watching content
- ‘Zedding’ addiction: OK, I’m using the Urban Dictionary’s synonym here as a way of including ‘sleep addiction’. The term ‘sleep addiction’ is sometimes used to describe the behavior of individuals who sleep too much. Conditions such as hypersomnia (the opposite of insomnia) has been referred to ‘sleeping addiction’ (in the populist literature at least). In a 2010 issue of the Rhode Island Medical Journal, Stanley Aronson wrote a short article entitled “Those esoteric, exoteric and fantabulous diagnoses” and listed clinomania as the compulsion to stay in bed. Given the use of the word ‘compulsive’ in this definition, there is an argument to consider clinomania as an addiction or at least a behaviour with addictive type elements.
Dr Mark Griffiths, Distinguished Professor of Behavioural Addiction, International Gaming Research Unit, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK
Further reading
Al‐Hebshi, N., & Skaug, N. (2005). Khat (Catha edulis) – An updated review. Addiction Biology, 10(4), 299-307.
Andreassen, C.S., Pallesen, S. Torsheim, T., Demetrovics, Z. & Griffiths, M.D. (2018). Tanning addiction: Conceptualization, assessment, and correlates. British Journal of Dermatology. doi: 10.1111/bjd.16480
Aronson, S. M. (2010). Those esoteric, exoteric and fantabulous diagnoses. Rhode Island Medical Journal, 93(5), 163.
Atroszko, P.A., Andreassen, C.S., Griffiths, M.D. & Pallesen, S. (2015). Study addiction – A new area of psychological study: Conceptualization, assessment, and preliminary empirical findings. Journal of Behavioral Addictions, 4, 75–84.
Atroszko, P.A., Andreassen, C.S., Griffiths, M.D. & Pallesen, S. (2016). Study addiction: A cross-cultural longitudinal study examining temporal stability and predictors of its changes. Journal of Behavioral Addictions, 5, 357–362.
Atroszko, P.A., Andreassen, C.S., Griffiths, M.D., Pallesen, S. (2016). The relationship between study addiction and work addiction: A cross-cultural longitudinal study. Journal of Behavioral Addiction, 5, 708–714.
Balakrishnan, J. & Griffiths, M.D. (2017). Social media addiction: What is the role of content in YouTube? Journal of Behavioral Addictions, 6, 364-377.
Black, D., Belsare, G., & Schlosser, S. (1999). Clinical features, psychiatric comorbidity, and health-related quality of life in persons reporting compulsive computer use behavior. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 60, 839-843.
Burn, C. (2016). Poesegraphilia – Addiction to the act of writing poetry. Poetry Changes Lives, May 27. Located at: http://www.poetrychangeslives.com/addiction-to-the-act-of-writing-poetry/
Cantelmi, T & Talls, M. (2009). Trapped in the web: The psychopathology of cyberspace. Journal of CyberTherapy and Rehabilitation, 2, 337-350.
Černý, L. & Černý, K. (1992). Can carrots be addictive? An extraordinary form of drug dependence. British Journal of Addiction, 87, 1195-1197.
Chan, S. H., & Yao, L. J. (2005). An empirical investigation of hacking behavior. The Review of Business Information Systems, 9(4), 42-58.
Daily Mail (2005). Aquaholics: Addicted to drinking water. May 16. Located at: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-348917/Aquaholics-Addicted-drinking-water.html
de Leon, J., Verghese, C., Tracy, J. I., Josiassen, R. C., & Simpson, G. M. (1994). Polydipsia and water intoxication in psychiatric patients: A review of the epidemiological literature. Biological Psychiatry, 35(6), 408-419.
Dundas, B., Harris, M., & Narasimhan, M. (2007). Psychogenic polydipsia review: etiology, differential, and treatment. Current Psychiatry Reports, 9(3), 236-241.
Edelstein, E.L. (1973). A case of water dependence. British Journal of Addiction to Alcohol and Other Drugs, 68, 365–367.
Foster, A.C., Shorter, G.W. & Griffiths, M.D. (2015). Muscle Dysmorphia: Could it be classified as an Addiction to Body Image? Journal of Behavioral Addictions, 4, 1-5.
Gaita, P. (2017). Does compulsive YouTube viewing qualify as addiction? The Fix, May 19. Located at: https://www.thefix.com/does-compulsive-youtube-viewing-qualify-addiction
Grall-Bronnec, M. Bulteau, S., Victorri-Vigneau, C., Bouju, G. & Sauvaget, A. (2015). Fortune telling addiction: Unfortunately a serious topic about a case report. Journal of Behavioral Addiction, 4, 27-31.
Griffiths, M.D. (1992). Pinball wizard: A case study of a pinball addict. Psychological Reports, 71, 160-162.
Griffiths, M.D. (2000). Computer crime and hacking: A serious issue for the police. Police Journal, 73, 18-24.
Griffiths, M.D. (2017). Commentary: Development and validation of a self-reported Questionnaire for Measuring Internet Search Dependence. Frontiers in Public Health, 5, 95. doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2017.00095
Griffiths, M.D., Foster, A.C. & Shorter, G.W. (2015). Muscle dysmorphia as an addiction: A response to Nieuwoudt (2015) and Grant (2015). Journal of Behavioral Addictions, 4, 11-13.
Hatfield, E., & Sprecher, S. (1998). The passionate love scale. In Fisher, T.D., Davis, C.M., Yarber, W.L. & Davis, S. (Eds.). Handbook of sexuality-related measures (pp. 449-451). London: Sage.
Heirene, R. M., Shearer, D., Roderique-Davies, G., & Mellalieu, S. D. (2016). Addiction in extreme sports: An exploration of withdrawal states in rock climbers. Journal of Behavioral Addictions, 5(2), 332-341.
Hickey, E.W. (2010). Serial Murderers and Their Victims (Fifth Edition). Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole.
Hunter, M. S., Nitschke, C., & Hogan, L. 1981. A scale to measure love addiction. Psychological Reports, 48, 582-582.
Ishaq, G., Rafique, R., & Asif, M. (2017). Personality traits and news addiction: Mediating role of self-control. Journal of Dow University of Health Sciences, 11(2), 31-53.
Jaghab, K., Skodnek, K. B., & Padder, T. A. (2006). Munchausen’s syndrome and other factitious disorders in children: Case series and literature review. Psychiatry (Edgmont), 3(3), 46-55.
Kaplan, R. (1996), Carrot addiction. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 30, 698-700.
Kellett, S. & Gross, H. (2006). Addicted to joyriding? An exploration of young offenders’ accounts of their car crime. Psychology, Crime & Law, 12, 39-59.
Kennedy, J. G., Teague, J., & Fairbanks, L. (1980). Qat use in North Yemen and the problem of addiction: a study in medical anthropology. Culture, medicine and psychiatry, 4(4), 311-344.
Kwon, M., Kim, Y., Kim, H., & Kim, J. (2018). Does sport addiction enhance frontal executive function? The case of badminton. NeuroQuantology, 16(6), 13-21.
Lam, J. (2017). Fifty shades of sexual offending – Part 1. The Law Gazette, July. Located at: http://v1.lawgazette.com.sg/2017-07/1910.htm
Loscalzo, Y, & Giannini, M. (2017). Evaluating the overstudy climate at school and in the family: The Overstudy Climate Scale (OCS). ARC Journal of Psychiatry, 2(3), 5-10.
Loscalzo, Y., & Giannini, M. (2018). Study engagement in Italian university students: A Confirmatory Factor Analysis of the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale—Student Version. Social Indicators Research, Epub ahead of print. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-018-1943-y
Manghi, R. A., Broers, B., Khan, R., Benguettat, D., Khazaal, Y., & Zullino, D. F. (2009). Khat use: lifestyle or addiction? Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, 41(1), 1-10.
Maraz, A., Urbán, R., Griffiths, M.D. & Demetrovics Z. (2015). An empirical investigation of dance addiction. PLoS ONE, 10(5): e0125988. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0125988.
Masters, B. (1986). Killing for Company: The Story of a Man Addicted to Murder. New York: Stein and Day.
McClurg, L. (2017). After compulsively watching YouTube, teenage girl lands in rehab for ‘digital addiction’. PBS Newshour, May 16. Located at: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/compulsively-watching-youtube-teenage-girl-lands-rehab-digital-addiction/
Menninger, K. A. (1934). Polysurgery and polysurgical addiction. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 3(2), 173-199.
Mercier-Guidez, E., & Loas, G. (2000). Polydipsia and water intoxication in 353 psychiatric inpatients: an epidemiological and psychopathological study. European Psychiatry, 15(5), 306-311.
Orosz, G., Bőthe, B., & Tóth-Király, I. (2016). The development of the Problematic Series WatchingScale (PSWS). Journal of Behavioral Addictions, 5(1), 144-150.
Peele, S. & Brodsky, A. (1975), Love and addiction. New York: Taplinger.
Peters, C. & Bodkin, C.D. (2007). An exploratory investigation of problematic online auction behaviors: Experiences of eBay users. Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 14(1), 1-16.
Reisinger, M. (2018). Addiction to death. CNS Spectrums, 23(2), 166-169.
Relangi, K. (2012). Gossip, the ugly addiction. Purple Room Healing, June 12. Located at: https://deadmanswill.wordpress.com/2012/06/02/gossip-the-ugly-addiction/
Roderique-Davies, G. R. D., Heirene, R. M., Mellalieu, S., & Shearer, D. A. (2018). Development and initial validation of a rock climbing craving questionnaire (RCCQ). Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 204. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00204
Sitford, M. (2000). Addicted to Murder: The True Story of Dr. Harold Shipman. London: Virgin Publishing.
Sparrow, P. & Griffiths, M.D. (1997). Crime and IT: Hacking and pornography on the internet. Probation Journal, 44, 144-147.
Spivack, A., & McKelvie, A. (2018). Entrepreneurship addiction: Shedding light on the manifestation of the ‘dark side’ in work behavior patterns. The Academy of Management Perspectives. https://doi.org/10.5465/amp.2016.0185
Spivack, A. J., McKelvie, A., & Haynie, J. M. (2014). Habitual entrepreneurs: Possible cases of entrepreneurship addiction? Journal of Business Venturing, 29(5), 651-667.
Targhetta, R., Nalpas, B. & Perney, P. (2013). Argentine tango: Another behavioral addiction? Journal of Behavioral Addictions, 2, 179-186.
Turel, O., Serenko, A. & Giles, P. (2011). Integrating technology addiction and use: An empirical investigation of online auction users. MIS Quarterly, 35, 1043-1061.
Walton-Pattison, E., Dombrowski, S.U. & Presseau, J. (2017). ‘Just one more episode’: Frequency and theoretical correlates of television binge watching. Journal of Health Psychology, doi:1359105316643379
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Wulfsohn, I. (2013). A dangerous addiction: Qat and its draining of Yemen’s water, economy, and people. Middle East Economy, 3(10), 1-5.
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Yung, K., Eickhoff, E., Davis, D. L., Klam, W. P., & Doan, A. P. (2014). Internet Addiction Disorder and problematic use of Google Glass™ in patient treated at a residential substance abuse treatment program. Addictive Behaviors, 41, 58-60.
Seedy CD*: A psychologist’s look at the music of Soft Cell
In a previous blog on examining all Adam Ant’s songs about sexual paraphilias, I noted that Soft Cell are probably the only other recording artists who come close to talking about the seedier side of sex. They are also artists that (like one of my other favourite bands, Throbbing Gristle) have never been afraid to sing about taboo topics including prostitution (‘Secret Life’, A Divided Soul’), a housewife’s sexual fantasy about the paper boy (‘Kitchen Sink Drama’), pure hedonism (‘Sensation Nation’), alternative therapies such as colonic irrigation, meditation, and crystal therapy (‘Whatever It Takes’), murder (‘The Best Way To Kill’, ‘Meet Murder My Angel’), suicide (‘Darker Times’, ‘Frustration’ and ‘Down In The Subway’ – “Jump on that train track and die”), incest (‘I Am 16’), psychopathic killers (‘Martin’ based on the story of a serial killer in a film of the same name), shopaholism (‘Whatever It Takes’), anorexia nervosa (‘Excretory Eat Anorexia’), and obsessional cleansing (‘Cleansing Fanatic’), to name but a few.
Soft Cell arguably saw themselves as outside of the norm. Their first official release, an EP entitled ‘Mutant Moments’ EP set out their psychological store (and where ‘Metro Mr. X’ was their “favourite mutant”). They also had a track on the seminal 1980 (various artists) Some Bizarre Album about a disfigured woman (‘The Girl With The Patent Leather Face’). Very few artists would ever sing about such topics (although there are a few exceptions such as Throbbing Gristle’s ‘Hamburger Lady’ based on the medical case notes of a badly burned woman).
Soft Cell’s reputation as a band that focused on the sleazy side of everyday life was cemented after the release of their 1981 debut album Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret (NSEC). The cover featured a photo of the band’s two members (Marc Almond and Dave Ball) taken outside the Raymond Revue Bar, a notorious strip joint in the heart of London’s Soho district.
Just as the Velvet Underground’s debut album was viewed as a ‘sex and drugs’ LP because of a couple of songs about sadomasochistic sex (‘Venus In Furs’) and drug-taking (‘Heroin’), NSEC’s reputation as a ‘sleazy sex’ album also rested on just a few songs – most notably ‘Seedy Films’ (about telephone sex as well as pornographic films), ‘Secret Life’ (about using prostitutes behind a wife’s back), and the (now infamous) ‘Sex Dwarf’ (a song glorifying sadomasochistic sex). Later songs and albums also touched on various aspects of sexuality (their third album This Last Night In Sodom raising a few eyebrows on its’ release in 1984). They wanted to “try all of the vices” (in ‘The Art Of Falling Apart’) and also sang about having sex in cars (‘It’s A Mug’s Game’ and ‘Where Was Your Heart [When You Needed It Most’).
One of my personal favourite in the Soft Cell canon is the 2002 song ‘Perversity’ which was a bonus track on their comeback single ‘Monoculture’ after reforming in 2001. It talked about studying at the “university of perversity” and provided me with the title to my series of blogs on the A-Z of little known paraphilias and fetishes. As Marc Almond and Friends, there was also a great cover version of Throbbing Gristle’s ‘Discipline’ (a song about sadomasochism) and ‘Sleaze It, Take It, Shake It’ (by Almond’s side-project, Marc and the Mambas)
Soft cell’s second hit single ‘Bedsitter’ summed up my formative years as a teenage clubber and shares some of the same lyrical DNA as The Smiths classic ‘How Soon Is Now?’ (going to nightclubs in search of love and/or sex but going home alone). I’d also argue that Soft Cell sometimes give The Smiths a run for their money when it comes to songs about misery (e.g., ‘Chips On My Shoulder’, ‘Mr. Self-Destruct’, ‘Bleak Is My Favourite Cliché’, ‘Forever The Same’, ‘Down In The Subway’ and ‘Born To Lose’).
But Soft Cell aren’t just about sex, they also like songs about love more generally although their take on love is more about the unrequited love, the disintegration of love (‘Tainted Love’, ‘Say Hello, Wave Goodbye’, ‘Where Did Our Love Go?’, ‘All Out Of Love’, ‘Together Alone’, ‘Desperate [For Love]’, ‘L.O.V.E. Feelings’, ‘Whatever It Takes’, ‘Last Chance’, ‘What’, ‘Barriers’, ‘Disease And Desire’, ‘Her Imagination’, ‘Desperate’, and ‘Torch’). In short they focus on (as they describe in their song ‘Loving You, Hating Me’) “the other side of love” and the “devil in my bed” (‘from ‘God-Shaped Hole’). The only other band that have explored the ‘darker’ side of love lyrically in so many different songs are Depeche Mode (which I discussed in a previous blog on obsessional lyrics in pop music). Their songs aren’t afraid to feature one-night stands and casual sex (‘Numbers’, ‘Surrender To A Stranger’, ‘Heat’, ‘Where Was Your Heart [When You Needed It Most’ and ‘Fun City’). It’s also worth noting that Soft Cell were never afraid to talk about drug use in their songs including cocaine (‘Frustration’), LSD (‘Frustration’), alcohol (‘It’s A Mug’s Game’), valium (‘Tupperware Party’, ‘My Secret Life’), heroin (‘L’Esqualita’) and their “dealer in the hall” (‘Divided Soul’).
They also made cover versions that were often better than the originals. They sexed the songs up or made them mean, moody and menacing. Soft Cell were huge fans of Northern soul and is evident in their covers of songs like ‘Tainted Love’, ‘The Night’ and ‘Where Did Our Love Go?’ but their other cover versions came from a wide variety of artists including Jimi Hendrix (their 11-minute ‘Hendrix Medley’ comprising ‘Hey Joe’, ‘Purple Haze’ and ‘Voodoo Chile’), Johnny Thunders (‘Born To Lose’), Suicide (‘Ghostrider’), Lou Reed (‘Caroline Says’ as Marc and the Mambas), and John Barry (‘007 Theme’ and ‘You Only Live Twice’). From the very first note, this were instantly Soft Cell even though they didn’t write the songs.
Lyrically (and musically), some of their best songs were on their final 2000 studio album Cruelty Without Beauty. For instance, ‘Caligula Syndrome’ depicts sadomasochism (“crawling down on your hands and knees like slaves”), orgies, and “every kind of deviation on demand”. The song ‘Grand Guignol’ is about the Parisian theatre that operated from 1897 until it closed in 1962. The theatre specialised in naturalistic amoral horror entertainment shows horror shows or as Soft Cell put it: “It’s Grand Guignol/It’s rock ‘n’ roll/It’s vaudeville and burlesque/All of human life is here/In the theatre of the grotesque”. A sentiment that (I would argue) also sums up the many of the blogs I have published on this website.
*With thanks to The Passage (one of my favourite bands) who used the homonym ‘Seedy’ when naming their first CD [C-D, geddit?] compilation.
Dr Mark Griffiths, Professor of Behavioural Addictions, International Gaming Research Unit, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK
Further reading
Almond, M. (1999). Tainted Life. London: Sidgwick and Jackson.
Almond, M. (2004). In Search Of The Pleasure Palace. London: Sidgwick and Jackson.
Fanni Tutti, C. (2017). Art Sex Music. Faber & Faber: London.
Lindsay, M. (2013). Sex music for gargoyles: Soft Cell’s The Art Of Falling Apart. The Quietus, December 12. Located at: http://thequietus.com/articles/14100-soft-cell-interview-marc-almond
Reed, J. (1999). Marc Almond: The Last Star. London: Creation Books.
Reynolds, S. (2006). Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk, 1978–1984. New York: Penguin.
Tebbutt, S. (1984). Soft Cell. London: Sidgwick and Jackson.
Wikipedia (2017). Marc Almond. Located at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Almond
Wikipedia (2017). Soft Cell. Located at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_Cell
Bog standard: A brief look at toilet tissue eating
In previous blogs I have looked at pica (i.e., the eating of non-nutritive items or substances) and subtypes of pica such as geophagia (eating of soil, mud, clay, etc.), pagophagia (eating of ice), acuphagia (eating of metal), and coprophagia (eating of faeces). It wasn’t until I started to research on specific sub-types of pica, that I discovered how many different types of non-food substances had been identified in the academic and clinical literature. For instance, Dr. V.J. Louw and colleagues provided a long list in a 2007 issue of the South African Medical Journal including cravings for the heads of burnt matches (cautopyreiophagia), cigarettes and cigarette ashes, paper, starch (amylophagia), crayons, cardboard, stones (lithophagia), mothballs, hair (trichophagia), egg shells, foam rubber, aspirin, coins, vinyl gloves, popcorn (arabositophagia), and baking powder. Most of these are generally thought to be harmless but as Louw and colleagues note, a wide range of medical problems have been documented:
“These include abdominal problems (sometimes necessitating surgery), hypokalaemia, hyperkalaemia, dental injury, napthalene poisoning (in pica for toilet air-freshener blocks), phosphorus poisoning (in pica for burnt matches), peritoneal mesothelioma (geophagia of asbestos-rich soil), mercury poisoning (in paper pica), lead poisoning (in dried paint pica and geophagia), and a pre-eclampsia-like syndrome (baking powder pica)”.
In the clinical literature, the eating of paper has been occasionally documented (although anecdotal evidence suggests this is fairly common and I remember doing it myself as a child). A review paper on pica by Dr. Silvestre Frenk and colleagues in the Mexican journal Boletín Médico del Hospital Infantil de México highlighted dozens of pica-subtypes and created many new names for various pica sub-types. They proposed that people who eat paper display ‘papirophagia’ (in fact if you type ‘papirphagia’ into Google, you only get one hit – the paper by Silvestre and colleagues – although this blog may make it two!). Eating paper is not thought to be particularly harmful although I did find a case of mercury poisoning because of ‘paper pica’ (as the authors – Dr. F. Olynk and Dr. D. Sharpe – called it) in a 1982 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
One sub-type of papirophagia is the eating of toilet paper. As far as I am aware, there is only one case study in the literature and this was published back in 1981, Dr. J. Chisholm Jr. and Dr. H. Martín in the Journal of the National Medical Association. They described the case of a 37-year old black woman with an “unusually bizarre craving” for toilet tissue paper. The authors reported that:
“[The] woman was referred for evaluation of disturbed smell and loss of taste for over one year. These were associated with chronic fatigue and listlessness. During this same period of time, she rather embarrassedly admitted to an overwhelming desire to eat toilet tissue. Frequently, she would awaken at night and dash to her bathroom to eat toilet tissue. No other type(s) of pica were admitted. In addition, she gave a long history of menorrhagia and frequently passed vaginal blood clots during her menses. Her libido was normal and there was no history of poor wound healing, skin or mucous membrane lesions, or intestinal symptoms. Her dietary history suggested a high carbohydrate diet, and due to a mild exogenous obesity she intermittently resorted to a vegan-like diet that included beans and various seeds”
A variety of medical tests were carried out and she was diagnosed with combined iron and zinc deficiency. She was treated with iron and zinc tablets and within a week, both her taste and smell had returned, and her energy levels greatly improved. Zinc deficiencies can lead to a wide variety of clinical disorders including loss of small and taste, anorexia, dwarfism (i.e., growth retardation), impaired wound healing, and geophagia. The woman’s (sometimes) vegan diet may have been to blame for her zinc deficiency as the authors noted that:
“Although vegetables contain zinc, vegans should be made aware that zinc from plant sources is not readily absorbed because naturally occurring phytates, particularly high in beans and seeds, reduce zinc gastrointestinal absorption. Carbohydrates are very poor sources of zinc. Chronic iron deficiency secondary to chronic menorrhagia accounts well for the anemia, fatigue, and unusual pica for toilet tissue noted in this patient”.
Paper pica has occasionally been mentioned in other academic papers although details have typically been limited. For instance, a 1995 paper in the journal Birth by Dr. N.R. Cooksey on three cases of pica in pregnancy reported that one of the women chewed non-perfumed blue toilet paper during the first trimester of her pregnancy (and was forced by her mother to stop). There was also a 2003 paper published by Dr. Dumaguing in the Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry and Neurology examining pica in mentally ill geriatrics. One of the cases mentioned was a 76-year old patient that not only ingested their medication (an emollient cream for arthritis) but was also recorded eating toilet paper, napkins, Styrofoam cups, crayons, and other patients’ medications.
A more recent 2008 paper by Dr. Sera Young and her colleagues in the journal PLoS ONE, critically reviewed procedures and guidelines for interviews and sample collection in relation to pica substances. In describing the protocols involved, they referred to paper pica in the questions that should be asked:
“What is the local name, brand name, or type of pica substance desired or consumed? This will help others to know if this substance has already been studied and assist interested researchers in obtaining subsequent samples at a later date. Furthermore, different manufactured products may contain different materials, e.g. Crayola chalkboard chalk contains slightly different ingredients from other brands. Similarly, the consequences of toilet tissue paper consumption are different from those of eating pages of a novel; information would be lost if the substance was simply described as paper. For these reasons, the substance consumed should be described in as much detail and as accurately as possible”.
Personally (and based on anecdotal evidence), I think that papirophagia is not overly rare (especially among children – although I admit this may be more out of curiosity that craving) but the clinical literature suggests that it is a fairly rare disorder found amongst distinct sub-groups (pregnant women, the mentally ill). Given the fact that for most people eating paper would not cause any problems, this would provide the main reason why so few cases end up seeking medical, clinical, and/or psychological help.
Dr Mark Griffiths, Professor of Behavioural Addiction, International Gaming Research Unit, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK
Further reading
Chisholm Jr, J. C., & Martín, H. I. (1981). Hypozincemia, ageusia, dysosmia, and toilet tissue pica. Journal of the National Medical Association, 73(2), 163-164.
Cooksey, N.R. (1995). Pica and olfactory craving of pregnancy: How deep are the secrets? Birth, 22, 129-137.
Dumaguing, N.I., Singh, I., Sethi, M., & Devanand, D.P. (2003). Pica in the geriatric mentally ill: unrelenting and potentially fatal. Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry and Neurology, 16, 189-191.
Frenk, S., Faure, M.A., Nieto, S. & Olivares, Z. (2013). Pica. Boletín Médico del Hospital Infantil de México, 70(1), 55-61
Louw, V.J., Du Preez, P., Malan, A., Van Deventer, L., Van Wyk, D., & Joubert, G. (2007). Pica and food craving in adults with iron deficiency in Bloemfontein, South Africa. South African Medical Journal, 97, 1069-1071.
Olynyk, F., & Sharpe, D. H. (1982). Mercury poisoning in paper pica. The New England Journal of Medicine, 306, 1056 -1057.
Young, S.L., Wilson, M.J., Miller, D., Hillier, S. (2008). Toward a comprehensive approach to the collection and analysis of pica substances, with emphasis on geophagic materials. PLoS ONE, 3(9), e3147. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0003147
Fat’s life: Another look inside the world of feederism
Online letter from Jill to ‘Dr. Feeder’: “I am a feedee from Boston in desperate need of a feeder. I have tried dieting and I know my mission is to be fat. I feel I can’t do it alone. I fantasize about meeting a dominant man who is a Feeder…How do I get fat on my own? What foods? Can you give me a sample daily diet?”
Response to Jill’s letter from ‘Dr. Feeder’: “See my article ‘How To Get Fat‘. The kinds of foods don’t matter so much. Eat what you enjoy the most, especially if it’s fattening. The more you enjoy overeating, the more you will overeat. A lot of variety is also important”.
In a previous blog on fat fetishism, I noted that the fetish also included ‘feederism’ and ‘gaining’ in which sexual arousal and gratification is stimulated through the person (referred to as the ‘feedee’) gaining body fat. Feederism is a practice carried out by many fat admirers within the context of their sexual relationships and is where the individuals concerned obtain sexual gratification from the encouraging and gaining of body fat through excessive food eating. Sexual gratification may also be facilitated and/or enhanced the eating behaviour itself, and/or from the feedee becoming fatter – known as ‘gaining’ – where either one or both individuals in the sexual relationship participate in activities that result in the gaining of excess body fat.
Since writing my previous article on the topic, I have briefly written about feederism in two of my academic papers on sexual paraphilias (one in the Archives of Sexual Behavior in relation to a case study I wrote on fart fetishism, and the other in the Journal of Behavioral Addictions on how the internet has facilitated scientific research into paraphilias – see ‘Further reading’ below). However, I was also interviewed for the Discovery Channel’s television programme Forbidden about American Gabi Jones from Colorado (aka ‘Gaining Gabi’) who appeared in the episode ‘Pleasure and Pain’.
At the time when the television programme was being recorded, Gabi weighed 490 pounds and her sole aim was to get even fatter and heavier (before she became a feedee she was 250 pounds). It is also her career and her thousands of online fans pay money who pay $20 a month to watch her eat as well as sending her food to eat (you can check out her online website here, but pleased be warned that it contains explicit sexual content). She also claims that she becomes sexually aroused when eating excessively.
“When I indulge, I never rush. I take my time and treat all meals as very sexual experiences. I love being fat and the idea of getting large excites me…For as long as I remember, I always loved the idea of getting softer and being this piece of art that I am creating…My body is a work of art”.
She claims she does it to show that women can be empowered and that fat can be sexy. She’s also a campaigner for ‘fat acceptance’. However, the (US) National Association for the Advancement of Fat Acceptance (NAAFA) is anti-feederism. The NAAFA exists “to help build a society in which people of every size are accepted with dignity and equality in all aspects of life” but has specifically noted in its manifesto that:
“NAAFA supports an individual’s right to control all choices concerning his or her own body. NAAFA opposes the practice of feeders, in which one partner in a sexual relationship expects and encourages another partner to gain weight…That all bodies, of all sizes, are joyous and that individuals of all sizes can and should expect and demand respect from sexual partners for their bodies just as they are. That people of all sizes become empowered to demand respect for their bodies in the context of sexual relationships, without attempting to lose or gain weight in order to win a partner’s approval or attract or retain that partner’s desire”.
At the time she was interviewed, Gabi had two ‘feeders’ – one male (Kenyon, from Kansas, US) and one female (nicknamed ‘Hearts’, from Colorado). As the show’s production notes reported:
“Kenyon lives in a small town in Kansas…Gabi says that Kenyon has actually been a fan of hers since he was 12 or 13 [years old], he discovered her online. Gabi says that she wouldn’t have anything to do with him because he was not of age, but after [Kenyon’s 18th birthday she] accepted him into her life as her food slave. Kenyon says that he had fantasized for years about feeding her live in person…He is now totally devoted to Gabi and she is happy to have him as part of her ‘chosen family’ and hopes to move him out from Kansas to Colorado to live with her fulltime someday soon…Hearts makes sure that Gabi has all the food she could want and need. Gabi also feeds her. It’s not a sexual thing or anything – ‘we’re not lesbians, we’re just really close friends’ – but when they feed each other it’s ‘sexy and fun’. They met in college at the start of this year and haven’t left each other’s side since…Hearts is also gaining. Gabi got her into it one day when they were lying on her bed and Hearts noticed how soft Gabi’s tummy was. This made her decide she wanted to get fat too. Hearts is currently 201 pounds and her goal weight is 400 pounds…Gabi says there are two types of gainers – ‘feedees’ who’ll eat anything and ‘foodees’ who’ll eat only quality food, not junk. Gabi says she identifies more with a foodie”.
Academically, there have been an increasing number of papers published over the last few years. For instance, Dr. Lesley Terry and her colleagues have also published papers on feederism in the Archives of Sexual Behavior. The first was a case study (which I outlined in my previous blog), and more recently an interesting experiment that assessed individuals’ arousal to feederism compared to ‘normal’ sexual activity and neutral activity. A total of 30 volunteers (15 men and 15 women) were assessed using penile plethysmography (for the males) and vaginal photoplethysmography (for the females) – none of who were feeders or feedees. The paper reported that:
“The volunteers were all shown sexual, neutral, and feeding still images while listening to audio recordings of sexual, neutral, and feeding stories. Participants did not genitally respond to feeding stimuli. However, both men and women subjectively rated feeding stimuli as more sexually arousing than neutral stimuli…the results of this study provide limited, but suggestive, evidence that feederism may be an exaggeration of a more normative pattern of subjective sexual arousal in response to feeding stimuli that exists in the general population.
Dr. Ariane Prohaska has published papers on feederism in such journals as the International Journal of Social Science Studies and Deviant Behavior. In one of her studies, she carried out a content analysis of feederism-related websites and examining feederism within heterosexual relationships. She concluded that feederism websites can take many forms “such as groups, advice sites, personal ads, and pornography. The content analysis also revealed that the internet is a place where fat women can find a community of similar others to support them”. She also noted that although feedersim has been classified as a transgressive sexual behaviour, it “usually mimics patriarchal sex in the process”. She also claimed that at its extreme “feederism is an abusive behavior dangerous to the partner (usually the woman) who desires to gain weight as quickly as possible”. As highlighted in the case of Gabi above, Dr. Prohaska concludes that feederism is a communal behavior, but she also notes:
“[W]hen it comes to feederism, men are still in control of the behavior and of how women are portrayed and treated as feedees. Although some of the websites discussed here may be advancing transgressive ideas about fat women as sexual beings, the objectification of women as sex objects is further perpetuated by these same websites. Bodies matter; normative ideas about fat women and heterosexual sex offline are perpetuated online. The internet is patriarchal as offline society. At its extreme, ideas about control over women involve manipulating their bodies using dangerous means, and the lines between consent and sexual assault are blurred. Consent is a difficult term to define in a culture where patriarchal values about sex have been internalized by members of society. Still, the internet has the potential to create loving, supportive communities for people of size rather than exploitative communities that mimic the offline world”.
Dr Mark Griffiths, Professor of Behavioural Addiction, International Gaming Research Unit, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK
Further reading
Charles, K., & Palkowski, M. (2015). Feederism: Eating, Weight Gain, and Sexual Pleasure. Palgrave Macmillan.
Griffiths, M.D. (2012). The use of online methodologies in studying paraphilia: A review. Journal of Behavioral Addictions, 1, 143-150.
Griffiths, M.D. (2013). Eproctophilia in a young adult male: A case study. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 42, 1383-1386.
Haslam, D.W. (2014). Obesity and Sexuality. In Controversies in Obesity (pp. 45-51). London: Springer.
Kyrölä, K. (2011). Adults growing sideways: Feederist pornography and fantasies of infantilism. Lambda Nordica: Tidskrift om homosexualitet, 16(2-3), 128-158.
Monaghan, L. (2005). Big handsome men, bears, and others: Virtual constructions of ‘fat male embodiment’. Body and Society, 11, 81-111.
Murray, S. (2004). Locating aesthetics: Sexing the fat woman. Social Semiotics, 14, 237-247.
Prohaska, A. (2013). Feederism: Transgressive behavior or same old patriarchal sex? International Journal of Social Science Studies, 1(2), 104-112.
Prohaska, A. (2014). Help me get fat! Feederism as communal deviance on the internet. Deviant Behavior, 35(4), 263-274.
Swami, V. & Furnham, A. (2009). Big and beautiful: Attractiveness and health ratings of the female body by male ‘‘fat admirers’’. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 38, 201-208.
Swami, V., & Tovee, M.J. (2006). The influence of body weight on the physical attractiveness preferences of feminist and non-feminist heterosexual women and lesbians. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 30, 252-257.
Swami, V. & Tovee, M.J. (2009). Big beautiful women: the body size preferences of male fat admirers. Journal of Sex Research, 46, 89-96.
Terry, L. L., Suschinsky, K. D., Lalumiere, M. L., & Vasey, P. L. (2012). Feederism: an exaggeration of a normative mate selection preference? Archives of Sexual Behavior, 41(1), 249-260
Terry, L.L. & Vasey, P.L. (2011). Feederism in a woman. Archives of Sexial Behavior, 40, 639-645.
Cheesy does it: An unusual case of sitophilia
In a previous blog I looked at sitophilia, a sexual paraphilia in which individuals have an erotic attraction to (and derive sexual arousal from) food. One of the strangest sitophile stories I have read concerns the case of the ‘Swiss Cheese Pervert’. In the run up to Christmas 2013, a chubby man estimated to be in his 40s was driving around the Mayfair district of Philadelphia (USA) and exposing his genitals to a number of women while seated in his Sedan. However, this was no ordinary case of exhibitionism. As the Fortean Times reported:
“He would then dangle a large slice of Swiss cheese over his penis and offers to pay the women to perform sexual acts on him using the snack. At least two other women received messages on [the] OKCupid [online dating website] they believe were from the same man, describing how being unpopular with women drove him to have sex with cheese. He offered to pay $50 for a woman to pleasure him with a slice. The city’s police suspect 41-year-old Chris Pagano, since he was arrested in 2006 and 2009 for allegedly propositioning women with Swiss cheese on the streets of Norristown, Philadelphia. Pagano claimed that the latest incidents had nothing to do with him – but the picture he used on Facebook was the same as the one on the OKCupid profile message sent to a woman asking her to indulge his cheese craving”.
Pagano’s previous arrests were well documented in the local Philadelphia press and one journalist (Victor Fiorello) has written a number of stories about Pagano’s sexual exploits. In one of his stories he obtained the court documents in relation to the 2006 and 2009 arrests and one extract (with the woman’s name removed to protect her identity) read that:
“[The woman] told police that at approximately 0030 hours she was walking home from a store the male approached her from behind and asked her a question. The male removed a large block of cheese from his pocket and told [the woman] that he would pay her $20 to rub the Swiss cheese on his penis. [The woman] became alarmed and fled on foot toward her residence. The male offered [the woman] more money as she fled the area. [The woman] described the male as white, balding, and weighing over 300 pounds”
Following the late 2013 reports in the local press, one woman (Gabby Chest) telephoned the police saying that she had got an email on the OKCupid website from a “really strange guy” fitting the description of Pagano and who in his message wrote that he was “looking for someone to perform masturbation on him with cheese”. In the online message to Ms. Chest, the man admitted that he had great difficulty in initiating relationships with women because of his weight problem. This (he claimed) led to his cheese fetish and helped him to deal with his sexual urges. The whole message was reprinted on the PhillyMag website and I have reprinted it verbatim as I think it provides a good insight into the behaviour:
“Hello, my name is Chris. I am sure you are seeking a relationship, and I am sort of seeking the same, well sort of. You see I am currently content with my life. I enjoy meeting new people and making friends, but I also enjoy looking for women who are just looking for fun, opportunities, and or sex. I am kind of hoping you may be one of those women, who are open to certain activities of a suggestive nature. I realize talking and or requesting anything sexual with a someone you don’t know can be a turn off for most, but would you be interested in getting to know me, and perhaps being involved in a sexual encounter together? I know it’s a bit much to take in, since you really don’t know me. Still I am open to get to know you at first before anything would happen. I want to be up-front with you and tell you what exactly I am looking for. This way you have an idea of what I am into. You see it’s not sex in the traditional sense, it’s more a fetish. Don’t get me wrong I do enjoy traditional sex, but I grown to prefer this more. This fetish is a Sitophilia type fetish. I will give you a short explanation that lead me to discover why I like this type of fetish.
You see, when I was young and even now I seemed to be judged on my looks and not on my personality. So finding women and starting relationships was harder for me then most. Couple that with a strong sex drive, and you get the picture. So I developed this fetish to help me deal with my sexual urges. I found that women tend to like dairy products, and settled on cheese to represent the girl. Thus I started having sex with cheese. I like to use Swiss cheese and would wrap slices of the cheese around penis, then masturbate. Now tho [sic], after finding several girls to do it for me, I prefer having girls do it for me, instead of myself. Still I suppose I was lucky in finding those women, and our relationships did not last long, since our relationship based more on my fetish and me helping them out money wise. When they became comfortable again, we stayed friends, but they seemed to move on with their lives or I moved on because of the drama that sometimes followed some of them. The other problem I encounter is that women tend to be more freaked out over my fetish, then they would be over other questionable activities that are far more disgusting then mine. I don’t understand why using cheese in the way I use it is so disturbing to women, the ones who have done my fetish for me say it’s quite vanilla compared to so things they have encountered, and say I am quite harmless given my kind personality. So my request is, is there any way you would be willing to strike up an arraignment with me to do my fetish for me, if of course you would be open to this sort of activity?
Lastly if I have offended you, I am sorry as it was not my intention to do so. I just hope my fetish with cheese does not disturb you in any way, sorry if it has. Also when I mention arrangement, please don’t think it just has to be money either, I know you are not a prostitute, in fact I don’t want women like that at all. It can be anything you feel is a fair trade. Please if you could please let me know if you might be interested or not, and what you think of my request, I would appreciate it, thanks”.
In another online message, it is alleged that he said: “I am lucky I never became a rapist”. This latter admission suggesting that his cheese infatuation was a less palatable alternative to his cheese infatuation. In an email on the OKCupid website, he wrote to another woman and added:
“I tried many different kinds of cheese, like American, Provolone, chez whiz, jack, and cheddar, but settled on Swiss as the best…because of its eye patterns, texture, and the way it feels against my penis. When I was younger I had far more stamina for cheese sex. I was able to wrap and wear a good 1½ pounds of Swiss cheese against my penis, and wear it for hours at a time before I would climax…One last note, I do not like cheese, except for mozzarella, and that is the one cheese I have never used on myself. So no I do not eat the cheese after I am done using it for pleasure, it is discarded. I am always asked that question”.
I found the online message sent to Ms. Chest of great psychological interest. Pagano obviously knew that his preferred sexual behaviour was sitophilia and that he himself conceptualized his own behaviour as fetishistic. He also provided what I believe to be a plausible explanation as to how cheese became a symbolic female substitute for sex. Using cheese in his early masturbatory experiences would almost certainly created an associative pairing between sex and cheese (to the point where cheese on its own may have caused a classically conditioned response resulting in sexual arousal). Pagano’s own realistic assessment of his sexual attractiveness appears to have led to sexual displacement in which cheese represented an outlet for his sexual urges and desires. He was fully aware that his desires would seem strange to most people and that he was prepared to pay for the activity if that helped women participate. From the newspaper reports I read, it would appear that the criminal exhibitionism (i.e., flashing his genitalia at women he approached in his car) was peripheral to his real desire of soliciting women to engage in ‘cheesy’ sex.
Dr. Mark Griffiths, Professor of Gambling Studies, International Gaming Research Unit, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK
Further reading
Aggrawal A. (2009). Forensic and Medico-legal Aspects of Sexual Crimes and Unusual Sexual Practices. Boca Raton: CRC Press.
Daily Mail (2014). ‘Swiss Cheese Pervert’ terrorizes Philadelphia asking women to perform sexual acts on him using a slice of fromage. Daily Mail. January 13. Located at: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2538687/Swiss-Cheese-Pervert-terrorizing-Philadelphia.html
Fiorello, V. (2014). Is this guy the Swiss Cheese Pervert? PhillyMag, January 11. Located at: www.phillymag.com/news/2014/01/11/norristowns-swiss-cheese-pervert/
Fiorello, V. (2014). Here are mugshots of alleged Swiss Cheese Pervert Chris Pagano. PhillyMag, January 11. Located at: http://www.phillymag.com/news/2014/01/13/mugshots-swiss-cheese-pervert-chris-pagano/
Fortean Times (2014). Please cheese me…Fortean Times, March 1, p.10
Displeasures of the flesh: A brief look at anthropophagolagnia and paraphilic behaviour in serial killers
In previous blogs I have examined the psychology of sexual cannibalism and erotophonophilia (aka ‘lust murder’) as well as an article that I wrote on serial killers that collect their victims’ body parts as ‘trophies’. One very rare sub-type of both sexual cannibalism and erotophonophilia is anthropophagolagnia. This particular type of sexual paraphilia has been defined by Dr Anil Aggrawal as the paraphilia of “rape with cannibalism” and by the Right Diagnosis website as “sexual urges, preferences or fantasies involving raping and then cannibalizing the victim”.
The Listaholic website goes as far to say that anthropophagolagnia is one of the ten “most bizarre sexual fetishes on earth” claiming that serial killer is the “poster boy” for these “twisted” individuals. Other serial killers that might be classed as anthropophagolagniacs include Albert Fish, Peter Kirsten, Ottis Toole and Ed Gein. However, there also appear to be cases of what I would call ‘systematic anthropophagolagnia’ if the extract I found online is true:
“While it is easy to dismiss one case as stemming from some sort of neurological aberrations in the participants, we also see sexualized cannibalism in modern day Africa. In the early 2000s in Congo, rape and cannibalism were reported to coincide sporadically across the region. The claims are backed by a UN investigation into the phenomena…Rebels would go into villages and rape the women and children, then dismember them alive while eating their flesh. There are many reports of family members being forced to eat the flesh of other murdered family members after being raped…The men committing these atrocities do not have any neurological aberrations, they simply have the power to exercise this behavior. While cannibalism has been practiced in Africa as part of spiritual traditions for centuries, sadistic sexualized torture is not part of that tradition. So why add it in? Presumably the rebels didn’t all happen to be born child rapists either, yet raping children is part of their terror campaign and they must be able to achieve an erection to carry out the task, and so it must be assumed they learned to like it”.
Last year, I also read about 40-year old preacher Stephen Tari, the leader of a 6,000-strong cannibal rape cult in Papua New Guinea. He was in prison following his conviction for a brutal rape but escaped (only to be killed by people from his village in retaliation for the cannibalistic rape murders he had committed). As a report in The Independent noted:
“[Tari] had previously been accused of raping, murdering and eating three girls in front of their traumatised mothers…The charismatic cult leader, who wore white robes and is said to have regularly drunk the blood of his ‘flower girls’, quickly returned to his home village of Gal after [a prison] escape, but could only manage six months before killing yet again…It has not yet been established if the murdered woman was killed as part of a blood sacrifice, but it is considered likely as Tari was said to have been attempting to resurrect his cult following the spell in prison”.
Dr. Eric Hickey (in his book Serial Murderers and Their Victims) notes that paraphilic behaviour is very common among those that commit sexual crimes (and that more than one is often present) but that the two activities (sex offending and paraphilias) may be two independent constructs and that one does not necessarily affect the other. In fact he notes that:
“Rather than paraphilia being caused by sexual pathology, they may be better understood as one of many forms of general social deviance…For the male serial killer, the paraphilia engaged in usually has escalated from softer forms to those that are considered not only criminal but violent as well. They range from unusual to incredibly bizarre and disgusting. As paraphilia develop, men affected by them often engage in several over a period of time. Most men who engage in paraphilia often exhibit three or four different forms, some of them simultaneously. For those with violent tendencies, soft paraphilia can quickly lead to experimentation with hardcore paraphilia that often involves the harming of others in sexual ways. For example, some paraphilic offenders prefer to stalk and sexually assault their victims in stores and other public places without getting caught. The thrill of hunting an unsuspecting victim contributes to sexually arousing the offender”.
Hickey asserts that anthropophagolagnia is one of the so-called ‘attack paraphilias’ (as opposed to the ‘preparatory paraphilias’). Attack paraphilias are described by Hickey as being sexually violent (towards other individuals including children in extreme circumstances). Preparatory paraphilias are defined by Hickey as those “that have been found as part of the lust killer’s sexual fantasies and activities” (including those that display anthropophagolagnia). However, Hickey notes that individuals that engage in preparatory paraphilias do not necessarily go on to become serial killers. He then goes on to say:
“The process of sexual fantasy development may include stealing items from victims. Burglary, although generally considered to be a property crime, also is sometimes a property crime for sexual purposes. Stealing underwear, toiletries, hair clippings, photographs, and other personal items provides the offender with souvenirs for him to fantasize over”.
Some of the examples Hickey cites are both revealing and psychologically interesting:
“One offender noted how he would climax each time he entered a victim’s home through a window. The thought of being alone with people sleeping in the house had become deeply eroticized. Another offender likes to break into homes and watch victims sleep. He eventually will touch the victim and will only leave when she begins to scream. He ‘began’ his sexual acting out as a voyeur. This paraphilic process was also examined by Purcell and Arrigo (2001), who note that the process consists of mutually interactive elements: paraphilic stimuli and fantasy; orgasmic conditioning process; and facilitators (drugs, alcohol, and pornography). The probability of the offender harming a victim is extremely high given the progressive nature of his sexual fantasies”.
Along with anthropophagolagnia, other ‘attack paraphilias’ that have been associated with serial killers include amokoscisia (sexual arousal or sexual frenzy from a desire to slash or mutilate other individuals [typically women]), anophelorastia (sexual arousal from defiling or ravaging another individual), biastophilia (sexual arousal from violently raping other individuals; also called raptophilia), dippoldism (sexual arousal from abusing children, typically in the form of spanking and corporal punishment), necrophilia (sexual arousal from having sex with acts with dead individuals), paedophilia (sexual arousal from having sex with minors typically via manipulation and grooming), and sexual sadism (empowerment and sexual arousal derived from inflicting pain and/or injuring other individuals).
The ‘preparatory paraphilias’ that typically precede serial killing and attack paraphilias such as anthropophagolagnia include agonophilia (sexual arousal caused by a sexual partner pretending to struggle), altocalciphilia (sexual arousal from high-heeled shoes), autonecrophilia (sexual arousal by imagining oneself as a dead person), exhibitionism (exposing genitals to inappropriate and/or non-consenting people for sexual arousal), frottage (sexual arousal from rubbing up against the body against a sexual partner or object), gerontophilia (sexual arousal from someone whose age is older and that of a different generation), hebephilia (men that are sexually aroused by aroused by teenagers), kleptolagnia (sexual arousal from stealing), retifism (sexual arousal from shoes), scatophilia (sexual arousal via making telephone calls, using vulgar language, and/or trying to elicit a reaction from the other party), scoptophilia (sexual arousal by watching others [typically engaged in sexual behaviour] without their consent, and more usually referred to as voyeurism), and somnophilia (sexual arousal from fondling strangers in their sleep). The multiplicity of co-existent paraphilias (including anthropophagolagnia) is highlighted by the Wikipedia entry on Jeffrey Dahmer:
“Dahmer readily admitted to having engaged in a number of paraphilic behaviors, including necrophilia, exhibitionism, hebephilia, fetishism, pygmalionism, and erotophonophilia. He is also known to have several partialisms, including anthropophagy (also known as cannibalism). One particular focus of Dahmer’s partialism was the victim’s chest area. By his own admission, what caught his attention to Steven Hicks hitchhiking in 1978 was the fact the youth was bare-chested; he also conceded it was possible that his viewing the exposed chest of Steven Tuomi in 1987 while in a drunken stupor may have led him to unsuccessfully attempt to tear Tuomi’s heart from his chest. Moreover, almost all the murders Dahmer committed from 1990 onwards involved a ritual of posing the victims’ bodies in suggestive positions – many pictures taken prior to dismemberment depict the victims’ bodies with the chest thrust outwards. Dahmer also derived sexual pleasure from the viscera of his victims; he would often masturbate and ejaculate into the body cavity and at other times, literally used the internal organs as a masturbatory aid”.
Almost nothing is known empirically about anthropophagolagnia except that it is very rare and that almost all information about it comes from serial killers that have been caught. Explanations for the development of anthropophagolagnia can only be speculated but are likely to be no different from the development of other paraphilic behaviour. Hickey (citing Irwin Sarason and Barbara Sarason’s Abnormal Psychology textbook) notes five key explanations for the development of paraphilias (reproduced below verbatim):
- Psychodynamic – paraphilic behavior as a manifestation of unresolved conflicts during psychosexual development;
- Behavioral – paraphilia is developed through conditioning, modeling, reinforcement, punishment, and rewards, the same process that normal sexual activity is learned;
- Cognitive – paraphilia become substitutes for appropriate social and sexual functioning or the inability to develop satisfying marital relationships;
- Biological – heredity, prenatal hormone environment, and factors contributing to gender identity can facilitate paraphilic interests. Other explanations are linked to brain malfunctioning and chromosomal abnormalities;
- Interactional – that development of paraphilia is a process that results from psychodynamic, behavioral, cognitive, and biological factors.
As an eclectic, I favour the interactional explanation for the existence of anthropophagolagnia but also believe that the most important influences are the behavioural aspects via classical and operant conditioning processes.
Dr. Mark Griffiths, Professor of Gambling Studies, International Gaming Research Unit, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK
Further reading
Aggrawal A. (2009). Forensic and Medico-legal Aspects of Sexual Crimes and Unusual Sexual Practices. Boca Raton: CRC Press.
Hall, J. (2013). ‘Black Jesus’ murder: Leader of 6,000-strong cannibal rape cult hacked to death by villagers in Papua New Guinea jungle after killing yet again. The Independent, August 30. Located at: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/black-jesus-murder-leader-of-6000strong-cannibal-rape-cult-hacked-to-death-by-villagers-in-papua-new-guinea-jungle-after-killing-yet-again-8791967.html
Hickey, E. W. (Ed.). (2003). Encyclopedia of Murder and Violent Crime. London: Sage Publications
Hickey, E. W. (2010). Serial Murderers and Their Victims (Fifth Edition). Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole.
Purcell, C., and B. Arrigo. (2001). Explaining paraphilias and lust murder: Toward an integrated model. International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology, 45(1), 6–31.
Sarason, I. G. and B. R. Sarason. (2004). Abnormal Psychology, 11th Edition. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall.
Wikipedia (2014). Jeffrey Dahmer. Located at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Dahmer
Blood discussed: A brief look at haematophagia
Haematophagia usually refers to the practice of animals feeding on the blood of another species. However, the term has also been applied to humans that consume blood (something that I have referred to in previous blogs on clinical vampirism and menophilia). Most writings on human haematophagia usually refer to the practice in some sexual and/or vampiric capacity (e.g., some individuals in China and Vietnam believe certain types of snake blood are aphrodisiacs and are drunk with rice wine) but haematophagia can also occur for other reasons.
While I working was in Spain, I was taken to one of the best Castilian restaurants, and as part of the starter I was served morcilla sausage. Morcilla sausage is basically a Spanish version of black pudding (aka ‘blood pudding’) and made from pig’s blood. I absolutely loved it. It did make me wonder what other ‘blood’ foods I might enjoy. I did a bit of research into the making of blood sausages and found out that variations of this dish exist in cultures all over the world (e.g., Europe, Asia, and the Americas), and that all kinds of different animals’ blood can be used (including pigs, sheep, cattle, goats, and ducks). According to the Wikipedia entry on human haematophagia:
“Drinking blood and manufacturing foodstuffs and delicacies with animal blood is also a feeding behavior in many societies. Cow blood mixed with milk, for example, is a mainstay food of the African Massai. Some sources say that Mongols would drink blood from one of their horses if it became a necessity. Black pudding is eaten in many places around the world. Some societies, such as the Moche, had ritual hematophagy, as well as the Scythians, a nomadic people of Russia, who had the habit of drinking the blood of the first enemy they would kill in battle…Psychiatric cases of patients performing hematophagy also exist. Sucking or licking one’s own blood from a wound is also a behavior commonly seen in humans, and in small enough quantities is not considered taboo. Finally, human vampirism has been a persistent object of literary and cultural attention”
There a numerous YouTube videos of the African Massai (in Tanzania) drinking blood directly from the necks of live cattle (such as here and here). Cattle blood drinking typically occurs after special celebrations (such as births, ritual circumcisions, etc.), but the special occasions are not compulsory for blood drinking to occur. The cattle are never killed and the cuts made to drink blood from appear to heal quickly. One report on the Environmental Graffiti website described the practice:
“Half a dozen Maasai warriors wrestle with the struggling cow. Another waits with his bow drawn, arrow at the ready. Finally, they have the straining animal in position. The warrior with the weapon shoots straight for the bovine’s jugular. Warm blood gushes into a waiting bucket, pumped out by the animal’s still-beating heart. The blood keeps flowing, almost filling the container, before the cow is released – its punctured neck sealed with a dab of cow dung. It will live to see another day. Its’ blood-donating job is done, at least for another month. The Maasai men who perform this blood-draining ritual do not intend to kill, or even harm, the animal. They merely want some of its nourishing crimson fluid to drink”.
Another Wikipedia entry focusing on blood as food notes that in addition to blood sausages, animal blood has also been used to thicken, colour, and/or flavour sauces and gravies, and for various types of blood soup (such as ‘czernina’ in Poland, ‘papas de sarrabulho’ in Portugal, and ‘svartsoppa’ made with goose blood in Sweden). Although blood is a taboo food in some cultures, in others it is perfectly acceptable – particularly in times when food has been scarce. Other cultures have other blood foods including blood pancakes (in Scandinavian and Baltic countries), blood tofu (China, Thailand, Vietnam), blood cake (Taiwan), blood potato dumplings (‘blodpalt’ made with reindeer blood in Sweden) and blood bread (‘paltbrod’ in Sweden). Additionally, Wikipedia noted that:
“Blood can also be used as a solid ingredient, either by allowing it to congeal before use, or by cooking it to accelerate the process. In Hungary when a pig is slaughtered in the morning the blood is fried with onions and is served for breakfast. In China, ‘blood tofu’ is most often made with pig’s or duck’s blood, although chicken’s or cow’s blood may also be used. The blood is allowed to congeal and simply cut into rectangular pieces and cooked. This dish is also known in Java as saren, made with chicken’s or pig’s blood. Blood tofu is found in curry mee as well as the Sichuan dish, maoxuewang. In Tibet, congealed yak’s blood is a traditional food”.
The Tanzanian Massai people are not the only culture to consume uncooked animal blood products. For instance, Inuits living in the Arctic Circle consume seal blood and believe it to have health and social benefits. According to a paper on consuming seal blood in a 1991 issue of Medical Anthropology Quarterly, seal blood is “seen as fortifying human blood by replacing depleted nutrients and rejuvenating the blood supply, [and] is considered a necessary part of the Inuit diet”. Another academic paper by Dr. Edmund Searles in a 2002 issue of the journal Food and Foodways reported that in relation to the drinking of seal blood: “Inuit food generates a strong flow of blood, a condition considered to be healthy and indicative of a strong body”. Historically, there are accounts of Irish people bleeding cattle as a preventative measure against cattle diseases. The Wikipedia entry on blood as food claims that the Irish mixed the drawn blood with “butter, herbs, oats or meal” to provide a “nutritious emergency food”.
During my research I also came across a story in The Atheist Times (with photographic evidence) of Hindus engaged in the practice of decapitating and drinking goat blood directly from its body (a blood sacrifice). The report claimed the practice was widely prevalent throughout India and Malaysia. These Hindus believe that the Hindu goddess Kali descends upon those drinking the goat’s blood.
Staying on the religious theme, there are (of course) many (arguably ‘mainstream’) simulated acts of haemotphagia – most notably in various religious ceremonies and rituals. The most obvious is in the transubstantiation of wine as the blood of Jesus Christ during Christian Eucharist (where religious followers believe they are drinking the blood of Christ). Various religions engage in such pseudo-haemotophagic practices including the Catholic Church, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, some Anglican, and Lutheran churches. (Other religions are the exact opposite and consider the drinking of blood taboo such as Jewish and Muslim cultures).
As this brief review demonstrates, non-sexual and non-vampiric human haematophagia and pseudo-haematophagia appear to be common and widespread in many cultures and countries. Academic research on the topic appears to be limited although it certainly warrants further investigation.
Dr Mark Griffiths, Professor of Gambling Studies, International Gaming Research Unit, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK
Further reading
Borré, K. (1991). Seal blood, Inuit blood, and diet: A biocultural model of physiology and cultural identity. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 5, 48-62.
Davidson, A (2006). The Oxford Companion to Food. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Searles, E. (2002). Food and the making of modern Inuit identities. Food and Foodways, 10(1-2), 55-78.
Wikipedia (2013). Blood as food. Located at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_as_food
Wikipedia (2013). Hematophagy. Located at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hematophagy
Let’s get physical: Exercise addiction (revisited)
At present, exercise addiction is not officially recognised in any medical or psychological diagnostic frameworks such as the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) or the World Health Association’s International Classification of Diseases. However, there has been a lot of research into whether exercise can be classed as a bona fide addiction. In spite of the widespread usage of the term ‘exercise addiction’ there are many different terminologies that describe excessive exercise syndrome. Such terms include ‘exercise dependence’, ‘obligatory exercising’, ‘exercise abuse’, and ‘compulsive exercise’. Exercise addiction has been conceptualised as a behavioural addiction. The symptoms and consequences of exercise addiction have often been characterised by six common components of addiction: salience, mood modification, tolerance, withdrawal symptoms, personal conflict, and relapse.
For some people, exercise addiction is a primary problem in the person’s life whereas in others it can be a secondary problem as a consequence of other psychological dysfunctions (like eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa). In the former case, the dysfunction is considered as primary exercise addiction, while in the latter case it is termed as secondary exercise addiction because it co-occurs with another dysfunction. The differentiating feature between the two is that in primary exercise addiction the objective is the exercise itself, whereas in secondary exercise addiction the objective is weight loss, where excessive exercise is one of the primary means in achieving the desired objective.
The incentive or motive for fulfilling planned exercise is an important distinguishing characteristic between addicted and nonaddicted exercisers. The reason people exercise is often for an intangible reward such as feeling in shape, looking good, being with friends, staying healthy, building muscles, losing weight, etc. The personal experience of the anticipated reward reinforces and strengthens the exercise behaviour. Committed exercisers maintain their exercise for benefiting or gaining from their activity and thus, their behaviour is motivated via positive reinforcement. However, empirical research has demonstrated that addicted exercisers have to exercise in order to avoid negative feelings or withdrawal. The individual’s exercise may become a chore that has to be fulfilled, or otherwise an unwanted event would occur (such as the inability to cope with stress, or gaining weight, becoming moody, etc.). Every time a person undertakes behaviour to avoid something negative, bad, and/or unpleasant, the motive behind that behaviour acts as a negative reinforcement. In these situations, the person feels they have to do it rather than wanting to do it.
Mood modification is a key factor among the symptoms of exercise addiction and suggests there is a self-medication aspect of exercise that facilitates the distinction between normal and abnormal exercise. Addicts do not simply exercise to experience the joy of it, but rather to escape negative, unpleasant feelings and everyday difficulties.
The Exercise Addiction Inventory is one of the most recent and most widely used screening tools in the research area of exercise addiction, primarily because of its brevity and excellent psychometric properties (i.e., reliability and validity). The EAI comprises only six statements, each corresponding to one of the symptoms in the ’components’ model of addiction. Each statement is rated on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). The EAI cut-off score for individuals considered at-risk of exercise addiction is 24 out of 30. To date, the only nationally representative study examining exercise addiction is a study that I co-authored with some Hungarian colleagues. We surveyed over 2,700 Hungarian adults aged 18–64 years and assessed exercise addiction using the EAI. Results showed that the proportion of the people at risk for exercise addiction was 0.5%.
There are numerous theories that deal with both the causes of exercise addiction and the process and mechanisms of its development and maintenance. A significant number of psychological theories are based on learning theory or the cognitive psychology approach. According to the theory of functioning, both positive reinforcers (e.g., a feeling of euphoria following exercise or muscle growth from exercise) and negative reinforcers (e.g. an end to unpleasant feelings through exercise or avoidance of the presumed negative effect of missed exercise) may lie behind the development and maintenance of exercise addiction which, according to the fundamental principles of learning theory, may contribute to the establishment of compulsive and addictive exercise that may be viewed as maladaptive.
One of my research colleagues, Dr. Attila Szabo stresses the role of cognitive appraisal mechanisms in the development of the vicious cycle that leads to excessive exercise. The process starts when the habitual exerciser uses exercise as a means of coping with stress, and the affected individual learns to depend on exercise at times of stress. The addicted exerciser is then trapped in a vicious cycle of needing increased amounts of exercise to deal with the consistently increasing life stress, part of which is caused by exercise itself.
It also appears that the issue of self-assessment represents a further significant factor among the psychological factors in the sense that during exercise, the physical strength experienced through exercise in a person dissatisfied with his or her body or body image contributes to the formation of a more positive self-image and self-assessment. It has also been shown that exercise activities (such as weightlifting) have a positive effect on body image and self-esteem both in men and in women. Perfectionism, obsessive-compulsive functioning, and heightened anxiety have also been claimed to be determining factors in exercise addiction.
The public promotion of healthy and appropriate exercise patterns may reduce the incidence of exercise addiction. It is important in public health programs and campaigns to (i) stress the healthy nature of regular exercise and (ii) communicate the message that exercise when taken to excess can be potentially harmful. It is important to raise awareness of potential harm within the population of regular exercisers. Some psychologists claim that individuals with exercise addiction have a poor understanding of the negative health consequences of excessive exercising, of the mechanism of exercise adaptation, and the need for rest between exercise sessions. The use of education may be an effective step in the prevention and treatment of exercise addiction.
As with other addictive disorders, the environment of regular exercisers also plays a significant role in recognising this condition early. In more severe cases psychotherapeutic interventions may be needed. When treating exercise addiction, abstinence from exercise may not be a required and/or realistic goal, because exercise has many benefits for health and no one would advocate doing no exercise. Therefore, the typical treatment goal would more likely be be to return to moderate and controlled exercise. In some cases, a different form of exercise may be recommended.
CASE STUDY
Joanna is a 25-year old student, well-educated female, from a stable family background, who realized that she had a problem surrounding exercise, and more specifically the martial art Jiu-Jitsu. Here, Joanna’s behavior is described in terms of the main components of addiction:
- Salience: Jiu-Jitsu is the most important activity in Joanna’s life. Even when not actually engaged in the activity, she is thinking about the next training session or competition. She estimates that she spends approximately six hours a day (and sometimes much more) involved in training (e.g., weight training, jogging, general exercise, etc.).
- Tolerance: Joanna started Jiu-Jitsu at an evening class once a week during her teenage years and built up slowly over a period of about five years. She now exercises every single day, and the lengths of the sessions have become longer and longer (suggesting tolerance).
- Withdrawal: Joanna claims she becomes highly agitated and irritable if she is unable to exercise. She claims she also gets headaches and feels nauseous if she goes for more than a day without training or has to miss a scheduled session.
- Mood modification: Joanna experiences mood changes in a number of ways. She feels very high and ‘buzzed up’ if she has done well in a Jiu-Jitsu competition (especially so if she wins). She also feels high if she has trained hard and for a long time.
- Conflict: Joanna’s relationship with her long-term partner ended as a result of her exercise. She claimed she never spent much time with him and was not even bothered about their break-up. Her university work suffered because of the lack of time and concentration.
- Loss of control: Joanna claims she cannot stop herself engaging in exercise when she “gets the urge”. Once she has started, she has to do a minimum of a few hours of exercise.
- Relapse: Joanna has continually tried to stop and/or cut down but claims she cannot. She becomes highly anxious if she is unable to engage in exercise and then has to go out and train to make herself feel better. She is well aware that exercise has taken over her life but feels powerless to stop it.
- Negative consequences: Joanna spends money beyond her means to maintain her exercising habit (e.g., on entrance fees for weight training, swimming, entrance fees enter Jiu-Jitsu tournaments across the country, etc.). She has resorted to socially unacceptable means (e.g., stealing) in order to get money to fund herself
In short, exercise is the most important thing in Joana’s life, and the number of hours engaged in physical activity per week has increased substantially over a five-year period. She displays withdrawal symptoms when she does not exercise, and experiences euphoric experiences related to various aspects of her exercising (e.g., training hard, winning competitions, etc.). She experiences conflict over exercise in many areas of her life and acknowledges she has a problem. Furthermore, she has lost friends, her relationship has broken down, her academic work has suffered, and she has considerable debt.
Note: An expanded version of this article was first published by Rehabs.com
Dr. Mark Griffiths, Professor of Gambling Studies, International Gaming Research Unit, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK
Further reading
Allegre, B., Souville, M., Therme, P., & Griffiths, M.D. (2006). Definitions and measures of exercise dependence, Addiction Research and Theory, 14, 631-646.
Allegre, B., Therme, P., & Griffiths, M. D. (2007). Individual factors and the context of physical activity in exercise dependence: A prospective study of ‘ultra-marathoners’. International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction, 5, 233-243.
Berczik, K., Szabó, A., Griffiths, M. D., Kurimay, T., Kun, B., Urbán, R., & Demetrovics, Z. (2012). Exercise addiction: symptoms, diagnosis, epidemiology, and etiology. Substance Use and Misuse, 47, 403-417.
Downs, D. S., Hausenblas, H. A., & Nigg, C. R. (2004). Factorial validity and psychomaetric examination of the Exercise Dependence Scale-Revised. Measurement in Phisical Education and Exercise Science, 8, 183-201.
Griffiths, M. (1997). Exercise addiction: A case study. Addiction Research, 5, 161-168.
Griffiths, M. D., Szabo, A., & Terry, A. (2005). The exercise addiction inventory: a quick and easy screening tool for health practitioners. British Journal of Sports Medicine, 39, e30-31.
Hausenblas H. A., & Downs, S. D. (2002a) Exercise dependence: a systematic review. Psychology of Sport Exercise, 3, 89-123.
Hausenblas, H. A., & Downs, S. D. (2002). How much is too much? The development and validation of the exercise dependence scale. Psychology and Health, 17, 387-404.
Mónok, K., Berczik, K., Urbán, R., Szabó, A., Griffiths, M.D., Farkas, J., Magi, A., Eisinger, A., Kurimay, T., Kökönyei, G., Kun, B., Paksi, B. & Demetrovics, Z. (2012). Psychometric properties and concurrent validity of two exercise addiction measures: A population wide study in Hungary. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 13, 739-746.
Sussman, S., Lisha, N., & Griffiths, M. D. (2011). Prevalence of the addictions: A problem of the majority or the minority? Evaluation and the Health Professions, 34, 3-56.
Szabo, A. (2000). Physical activity as a source of psychological dysfunction. In S. J. Biddle, K. R. Fox & S. H. Boutcher (Eds.), Physical Activity and Psychological Well-Being (pp. 130-153). London: Routledge.
Szabo, A., & Griffiths, M. D. (2007). Exercise addiction in British sport science students. International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction, 5, 25-28.
Terry, A., Szabo, A., & Griffiths, M. (2004). The exercise addiction inventory: a new brief screening tool. Addiction Research and Theory, 12, 489-499.
Blood pressures: Interview with a [female] vampire
In a previous blog I briefly examined clinical vampirism as a sexual paraphilia. In that blog I noted that there had been very little empirical research on clinical vampirism and that most of what is known comes from clinical case studies. Furthermore, vampirism (i) is rarely a single clinical condition, (ii) may or may not be associated with other psychiatric and/or psychological disorders (e.g., severe psychopathy, schizophrenia, hysteria, mental retardation), and (iii) may or may not necessarily include sexual arousal. Other related conditions include odaxelagnia (deriving sexual pleasure from biting), haematolagnia (deriving sexual satisfaction from the drinking of blood), and haematophilia (deriving sexual satisfaction from blood in general), and auto-haemofetishism (i.e., deriving sexual pleasure from sight of blood drawn into a syringe during intravenous drug practice).
More recently I was contacted by a female ‘vampire’ (I use the term lightly in this instance) who has read my original article wanted to share her story with me. She gave me permission to disseminate her story with my blog readers on the understanding that I guaranteed her anonymity, confidentiality, and used her preferred name of ‘Countess Maria’ (CM) throughout the article. (She also signed herself as ‘The Young Madam’ but I will use CM for the remainder of this article). Obviously, I have no way of verifying anything that CM communicated to me, but on a personal level I have no reason to doubt the veracity of her claims. All of our communication was via email under her real name (which I then checked out online on a specific social networking site and I am 100% sure that she is who she says she is). She also said she “would be honored to have you feature my story. I have answered your questions…as I honor your intellect and respect…being a professor is indeed a respectable, hardy, and challenging profession which is why I greatly respect an honor such profession”. More specifically, she added:
CM: “Whom I share this information must take it to the grave with them; except for you. You may share my story if and only if you use my name I have used for years ‘Countess Marie’. I do indeed consider myself a Countess due to what I have endured through humanitarian efforts as well as my ever strong want, need, and desire to help humanity – even if humanity shuns me for who I am”.
I asked CM for some socio-demographic information and she told me that she was 23 years of age, described herself as an African American and was currently employed as a Pharmacy Technician. Based on what she told me, she was well educated with various medical qualifications including Pharmacy Technician and Animal Care Certification. I also asked her about her religious beliefs and she responded: “Christian with great noble intent (‘I will gladly share my last piece of bread with my fellow man’). I live by that statement and I intend to follow through”. She also went ion to say: “I am finally in my studied job, as a Pharmacy Technician. I have always had a thing for helping people…this is just one if the many ways I can help. My dream in life is to be a great humanitarian and grow to greatness in helping those around me…I love who I am, and I am always wanting to follow my path.
In her account, CM didn’t really label herself a vampire but admitted that she liked drinking blood, and that many of the acts she engaged in would be labelled as vampire-like by others. She also talked about her first experiences of blood-sucking:
CM: “It is my understanding that you wish to hear about my further expansion on my clinical vampirism. Truthfully, I don’t really put a label on what it is I do. I have been consuming blood since I was young. The first cut I ever got was from a tree branch. I sucked my arm for several hours because the taste was delicious”.
At that point, CM didn’t really view her activity as in any way wrong but over time she began to realize that blood sucking was not considered normal behaviour and that she was socially ostracized by those who knew about her love of blood:
CM: “As I furthered in age through the years I noticed that I was considered different and odd, but I kept to myself about it. My love, my best friends, and you are the only people to know I consume blood…I would also like to add I have been called everything in the book for consuming blood; Monster, Demon, Grim’s Helper, and all the names in the middle…[Even] my friends called me [these things] at first because they did not understand what it mean for me”
However, CM went to great lengths to tell me that her love of blood did not involve the sucking of blood from other humans:
CM: “Make no mistake…I have never consumed blood from any human being – [only] myself. I consume pork blood, beef blood, and if that cannot be obtained I buy steaks and cook them very rare just enough for blood to spill out of it. I enjoy eating food, but it’s not really fun if it lacks in my nutrition. I add blood to juice, tea, desserts, cakes, salads, and disguise it in all sorts of ways”.
CM claimed she would never do anything that impacted on other humans and that morally it would be wrong to enforce her own beliefs and desires on others. She also believes that blood consumption is what keeps her alive:
“I never feed anyone else my blood food. I cook human food properly for guests for I know I am the only one who enjoys the taste of blood. To many, it is bitter and irony-metallic tasting. I cannot relate, due to the fact that for me, it tastes like fine wine. Without blood, I know that I would surely die. I need blood to live. I have always felt that way. Nothing on Earth will ever change my thoughts on the matter. I love blood…To me blood is life or death”.
CM also told me she had been diagnosed with anemia and I asked her whether believed that her love of blood may be because she has anemia:
“I will always love blood. I know that as far as my health goes, it actually favors blood consumption. I was told I almost died by slowly falling into a coma from sleeping for almost 4 straight days. The entire time I was asleep it only felt like seconds, but when I awoke, everyone was worried…I was diagnosed with being anemic, as well as hyperthyroidism. My hyperthyroidism is such [that] I will be on Levothyroxin until the day I die. My blood naturally lacks the iron (due to being anemic) so consuming blood helps me in many ways…I feel that my anemia further shows me that when I feel dizzy or “off centered” that I should consume blood. I only consume pig or beef blood…NEVER human blood”.
As she had read my article clinical vampirism as a sexual paraphilia I also asked CM if her consuming of blood was in any way sexually motivate. She responded by saying:
“The sight of blood is a turn on for me, but only inside of a container. If someone is bleeding of course I would help aid them and stop the pain. If I see frozen blood in the grocery store or walk in the meat section at the market for too long, all I can smell is the blood, which causes arousal for me. I don’t stay in butcher shops long for that reason”.
This suggests that blood for CM (in some circumstances) is sexually arousing and that there may be paraphilic elements in her reason for liking blood. Whether CM is typical of other ‘vampires’ is not clear. But given the little we know about people that love drinking blood, I am grateful to CM for her time in answering my questions and her honesty in relation to the development and motivations underpinning her hobby.
Dr. Mark Griffiths, Professor of Gambling Studies, International Gaming Research Unit, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK
Further reading
Benezech, M., Bourgeois, M., Boukhabza, D. & Yesavage, J. (1981). Cannibalism and vampirism in paranoid schizophrenia. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 42(7), 290.
Gubb, K., Segal, J., Khota1, A, Dicks, A. (2006). Clinical Vampirism: a review and illustrative case report. South African Psychiatry Review, 9, 163-168.
Halevy, A., Levi, Y., Ahnaker, A. & Orda, R. (1989). Auto-vampirism: An unusual cause of anaemia. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 82, 630-631.
Hemphill R.E. & Zabow T. (1983) Clinical vampirism. A presentation of 3 cases and a re-evaluation of Haigh, the ‘acid-bath murderer’. South African Medical Journal, 63(8), 278-81.
Kelly, B.D., Abood, Z. & Shanley, D. (1999). Vampirism and schizophrenia. Irish Journal of Psychological Medicine, 16, 114-117.
Jaffe, P., & DiCataldo, F. (1994). Clinical vampirism: Blending myth and reality. Bulletin of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, 22, 533-544.
Miller, T.W., Veltkamp, L.J., Kraus, R.F., Lane T. & Heister, T. (1999). An adolescent vampire cult in rural America: clinical issues and case study. Child Psychiatry and Human Development 29, 209-19.
Milner, J.S. Dopke, C.A. & Crouch, J.L. (2008). Paraphilia not otherwise specified: Psychopathology and Theory In Laws, D.R. & O’Donohue, W.T. (Eds.), Sexual Deviance: Theory, Assessment and Treatment (pp. 384-418). New York: Guildford Press.
Noll, R. (1992). Vampires, Werewolves and Demons: Twentieth Century Reports in the Psychiatric Literature. New York: Brunner/Mazel.
Prins, H. (1985). Vampirism: A clinical condition. British Journal of Psychiatry, 146, 666-668.
Vanden Bergh, R. L., & Kelly, J. F. (1964). Vampirism: A review with new observations. Archives of General Psychiatry, 11, 543-547.
Wilson N. (2000) A psychoanalytic contribution to psychic vampirism: a case vignette. American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 60, 177-86.
Yates, P.M., Hucker, S.J. & Kingston, W.A. (2008). Sexual sadism: Psychopathology and theory. In Laws, D.R. & O’Donohue, W.T. (Eds.), Sexual Deviance: Theory, Assessment and Treatment. pp.213-230. New York: Guildford Press.
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