Addiction is a great concept for creating stigma. Addicts are, by definition, people who can't ingest or do some thing in moderation, unlike the rest of us. They're struggling with problems created by their own behavior, and their troubles take money from us regular people to help pay for smokers' cancer treatments, heroin users' methadone clinics, alcoholics' liver transplants, and so on.
In other words, they don't behave like us, and they don't live right, and they cause us trouble. To call some practice an addiction, then, is to reduce the kinship we feel with its practitioners. They cease to be fellow parents or fellow Americans or fellow Christians, and become a problem to be dealt with.
The mind is alert for markers of inferior, lesser-human status. That should make you wary of any attempt to extend the medical notion of addiction into areas that don't involve chemical dependence. That's why I'm leery of the notion that people are addicted to sex, the Internet, or food.
And now there's this new claim that some people are addicted to . . . sunshine. Pretty silly.
