E-books: addiction studies

According to the World Health Organisation, pathological addiction is the psychic, and sometimes even physical, condition arising from the interaction between a living organism and an exogenous substance, characterised by behavioral responses and other reactions that always include a compulsive need to take the substance continuously or periodically, in order to get its psychic effects and/or to avoid the distress related to its withdrawal. This book presents a review on Internet addiction, which is considered an emergent problem especially amongst adolescents, and examines the risk factors and health effects of this addiction.

Smoking tobacco presents serious social problems with major impacts on public health. It is estimated that 25-30% of the general population in western countries are currently smoking. Tobacco use is the major preventable cause of death in the United States, responsible for more than 400,000 deaths annually. Within the USA and Europe, 70% of all smokers have tried to quit smoking at least once, but only about 6% of these succeeded in maintaining abstinence. This book covers the latest nicotine-related research. The selection of chapters has a certain unity as physiologic, pathologic and psychological themes run through the book and supply the logical connections between the various authors. This work is intended as a contribution to the reversal of the current tobacco epidemic and thereby to preventing many of the deaths attributable to tobacco predicted in this century.

The intertwining of addiction and responsibility in personal, philosophical, legal, research, and clinical contexts. Addictive behavior threatens not just the addict's happiness and health but also the welfare and well-being of others. It represents a loss of self-control and a variety of other cognitive impairments and behavioral deficits. An addict may say, "I couldn't help myself." But questions arise: are we responsible for our addictions? And what responsibilities do others have to help us? This volume offers a range of perspectives on addiction and responsibility and how the two are bound together. Distinguished contributors--from theorists to clinicians, from neuroscientists and psychologists to philosophers and legal scholars--discuss these questions in essays using a variety of conceptual and investigative tools. Some contributors offer models of addiction-related phenomena, including theories of incentive sensitization, ego-depletion, and pathological affect; others address such traditional philosophical questions as free will and agency, mind-body, and other minds. Two essays, written by scholars who were themselves addicts, attempt to integrate first-person phenomenological accounts with the third-person perspective of the sciences. Contributors distinguish among moral responsibility, legal responsibility, and the ethical responsibility of clinicians and researchers. Taken together, the essays offer a forceful argument that we cannot fully understand addiction if we do not also understand responsibility.

Our understandings of addiction are rapidly changing. New technologies and biomedical treatments are reconfiguring addiction as a brain disease, and the concept of "addiction" is expanding to cover an ever widening array of substances and behaviours, from food to shopping. This volume looks critically at how addiction has been framed historically, how it is characterized and understood through contemporary cultural representations, how new treatments and technologies are reconfiguring addiction, and how "addiction" is being expanded beyond illicit drugs and alcohol to explain phenomena such as "excessive" eating and gambling and the exponential rise in prescription narcotic use. It also examines how medical, behavioural and punitive frameworks come together to shape and control "addicts." Featuring the work of several up-and-coming scholars working to deepen theoretical perspectives on addiction and its relationship to social control and deviance, this volume fills a gap in addiction studies by offering critical perspectives that interrogate and challenge traditional and/or mainstream understandings of addiction.

Breaking the Addiction to Process will give you a clear understanding of the way Agile works and how it can improve your business practices. It explains how Agile will help you to improve your relationships with your customers, to work more efficiently with your colleagues and to develop more streamlined and successful working practices, saving you time and money. This practical twelve-step guide is clearly written and offers simple solutions to age-old problems. Agile is a flexible, adaptable system and this book will help you to implement it for maximum impact and success for your business. About the author Elizabeth Scanlon Thomas is a member of the Nokia Agile Community and the London Agile Community. She is a documentation manager at Nokia, having begun her career in advertising and marketing before moving into writing in IT.