DDN April 2019 DDN April 2019 | Page 16

Reviews The Incurable Romantic and Other Unsettling Revelations The Incurable Romantic and other Unsettling Revelations, by Frank Tallis ISBN: 978-0349142951 Abacus (paperback), £9.99 Anyone who has attended a sex and love addiction meeting knows that when natural human instincts and emotions run out of control, they can cause deep distress. Psychotherapist Frank Tallis skilfully illustrates a full and often extreme range of such cases, including a paedophile who would ‘rather die’ than act out his obsession with a six-year-old girl. Intimate relationships are often problematic for people who’ve been addicted to alcohol and other drugs. Don’t get involved with anyone in your first year clean and sober, is an advice mantra. Recovery needs time to replace self-loathing and consolidate what Tallis terms, ‘a sense of one’s own identity’. ‘He reminded me of an addict,’ the author says of a client who has been rejected, ‘the sudden withdrawal of the object of his desire made him profoundly depressed’, there was a ‘shivering enfeeblement’. Just as someone in early addiction might not see any downside to their drug of choice, he idealised the woman he loved as a goddess, with only adorable traits: a fixation. Love is always fuelled by endogenous ‘drugs’: dopamine, phenethylamine, oxytocin and testosterone. Sex involves ‘compounds that resemble amphetamines and opiates, with hormone rushes as addictive as street drugs’, while ‘the psychoactive substances released into our bloodstream when we are aroused can take us out of time and make us feel boundless and eternal’. In The Woman Who Wasn’t There, a female client is utterly convinced her male partner is having an affair. She checks the bed for tell-tale ‘stains, hairs… picking them off the sheet and holding them under a lamp’. She is diagnosed with Delusional Disorder: Jealous Type. The man denies her ‘oppressive’ suspicions. ‘Was he telling the truth?’ Tallis thinks so, but his is not an exact science and ‘I could be wrong’. The Man Who Had Everything is a rich young entrepreneur who definitely hasn’t been honest with his wife. She finds out he’s seen prostitutes. It’s MEDIA SAVVY ‘It’s reignited the debate on the ways violent crime is linked to a rise in cocaine use.’ THE SENSELESS SLAYING OF 17-YEAR- OLD JODIE CHESNEY in an Essex park a week ago shocked Britain. Not only has it shone a spotlight on the country’s spiralling knife crime epidemic but it’s reignited the debate on the ways violent crime is linked to a rise in cocaine use – and how the 875,000 16 | drinkanddrugsnews | April 2019 Brits who take it each year could be complicit in her death. Rebecca Evans, Sun , 9 March MANY OF THE PEOPLE I KNEW FROM NA ARE DEAD. Some relapsed and overdosed. Some killed themselves. Some died of Aids and hepatitis C. actually more than 3,000. He takes escorts to candlelit dinners and shows them round big houses as if they were buying together. He’s addicted to being fallen in love with. Then he wants to do it all again, with someone new. Tallis has a likeable writing personality, willing to admit mistakes: ‘I had become an inquisitor, and the rapidity of my questions made him uneasy’. He tightly weaves his attempts to help manage abnormalities with fascinating historical and theoretical background. It works perfectly. We also get to know the author, including his own love-life failures. He seeks ‘the thrill of the uncanny’ (which is also a celebration of diversity). ‘Abandoned’ is a frequent word here. There are people who have been left adrift, sometimes by an untreated repressed childhood memory. Tallis also loves going to abandoned places, especially ‘wandering around old asylums, looking for curiosities’. This essential book leaves few crevices of the human mind and body unattended to. Review by Mark Reid Don’t get involved with anyone in your first year clean and sober... Recovery needs time to replace self-loathing. The news, and the skews, in the national media Others have died of heart disease and cancer: a far higher mortality rate from natural causes than among those I know who weren’t addicts… I am one of the fortunate ones. Sure, I’ve worked hard at my recovery, but I have been lucky to have people in my life whom I adore and to have been able to make a career out of doing a job I love. Yes, it would have been nice to have enjoyed it all a bit more – I tend only to recognise happiness as the absence of pain – but you can’t have everything. I’m still here and that’s the main thing. John Crace, Guardian , 25 March CLAIMING THAT ADDICTION IS A DISEASE is not only scientifically baseless, it hinders rather than helps many addicts because it undermines hope. It makes them believe they do not have agency over their condition, that they are helpless in the face of a greater force. Whereas they are the only ones who can help themselves. Jan Moir, Mail , 8 March NO, NOT EVERY MARIJUANA SMOKER GOES OUT AND KILLS. So what? Not every boozer gets into fights, or commits rape, or kills people with drunken driving. Not every cigarette smoker gets cancer or heart disease. But we act against these things because of the significant minority who do cause or experience these tragic outcomes. And almost all of those who go out and kill someone with a blade will turn out, once the investigation is over, to be a long-term user of marijuana, no longer wholly sane or wholly civilised. Its widespread use is the only significant social change in this country that correlates with the rise in homicidal violence. Peter Hitchens, Mail on Sunday , 11 March www.drinkanddrugsnews.com