Who wouldn’t want to be fit and well? It’s certainly a reasonable desire, but today’s society has made well-being, fitness and health into an obsession reinforced by media such as publicity, television and magazines. The number of people affected by hypochondria is increasing with every passing year, reinforced by new weight-loss programs, new dietary supplements, and new products to make you look younger. This obsession with having a perfectly healthy…
The relationship between sleep disorders (or “somnipathy”) and internet addiction is not really well known. However, because of the importance of both conditions, we feel that it is appropriate to assess their relationship. It is well known that becoming addicted to the screen can have a negative impact upon our health. What’s less well known is that every night millions of young people wake up to access the Internet. In…
The medical term bulimia was borrowed as recently as 1979 from an older French word meaning “an unstoppable desire to consume”, which is why in France, at least, people will sometimes say jokingly “Hey, you’re bulimic today!” or talk about “bulimia of reading”. However the medical problem of bulimia, characterised by eating huge amounts of food, is no joke. It would be a mistake not to take it seriously,…
Behind many instances of memory loss lie addictions, whether to psychoactive substances, or to technology, or a food-related addiction. All forms of dependence, whether physical or emotional, have an effect on our mental state. Each addiction has its own effect, and some are lot nastier than others… Addiction to psychoactive substances As we said in our article about psychoactive substances, drug addiction has undesirable effects and is particularly harmful to…
The trivialisation of cannabis – would you like a little joint? Of all the psychoactive substances, cannabis is one the most often tried by young people, with a first experience around the age of 14. Easily available, it has already attracted 17 million people in France, and it has become commonplace. Today, smoking a joint is almost an everyday act, but it carries certain risks. Most young people seem unaware…
When solitude hurts… It’s well known that “man is by nature a social animal”. This famous maxim is attributed to Aristotle, who seems to have been blind to a huge chunk of reality, because today more and more people complain of loneliness and try to escape it. They have developed defence mechanisms to guarantee that they’re always in company – multiple romances, total submission to a partner, living with their…
When we walk around shops, all of us sometimes see things that we would like to possess. In a world full of consumer goods, and limited money to buy them, sometimes that desire to possess can become an impulse to steal. However, few of us act on such impulses. Kleptomaniacs are different. Kleptomania refers to a mental health condition where the sufferer is unable to resist the impulse to steal…
Money, whether you analyse it to the last detail, right down to Georg Simmel’s The Philosophy of Money, or whether you have only a purely practical view of it, is a universal exchange medium which builds both our hopes and our anxieties. In this article, we’ll look at what happens when a person has a pathological relationship with money, one which falls within the category of addiction. When money burns…
Tinder who?? Well, unless you live on another planet or you’re completely disconnected from everything going on around you, if you’re between 20 and 35 years old, you must have heard of or used the famous dating app that everybody’s talking about. It’s already given rise to some new words like Tinderella and Tinder-Surprise, to which we would have to add Tinder Addict! For obvious reasons of ease of use,…
The standards of beauty vary from one culture to another and at different times in history. In western societies, for a long time having fair skin was synonymous with aristocracy. The idea is that if you have bronzed skin, it’s because you often work hard outdoors, so you belong to the working classes. Until the end of the 20th century, members of the upper classes protected their skin from sunshine….