President Trump delivered an epic rant today about the FBI raid of his lawyer’s office, calling it a “disgrace,” a “witch hunt,” an “attack on our country,” and “a whole new level of unfairness.” He also declared, yet again, that he was pissed off about Jeff Sessions recusing himself (“he should have certainly let us know if he was going to recuse himself, and we would have put a different attorney general in”) and also pissed off that arch-criminal Hillary Clinton continues to avoid a life sentence at Sing Sing. And he’s pissed off that this is taking attention away from whatever manly action he decides to take against Syria. Presumably this means we can expect a truly epic storm of rage tweets either tonight or tomorrow morning. Whatever lawyers he has left must be cowering in fear while they wait to see if Trump manages to make it through tomorrow without incriminating himself.
While we wait for all this, the New York Times ran a piece over the weekend about people having trouble quitting antidepressants because of horrible withdrawal symptoms. JSA Lowe was unhappy about it:
in which the Paper of Record™ doesn’t understand the difference between withdrawal (addiction), discontinuation (habituation) and just plain old return of symptoms—and thus ensures their readers will also not make the distinction https://t.co/HDhOD6kZLa
— JSA Lowe (@jsalowe) April 9, 2018
Back in my younger days I occasionally got pedantic with people about the difference between addiction and habituation. I suppose I learned it from my father. But eventually it seemed like the word habituation just disappeared. Everything was an addiction, regardless of its etiology. So I gave in and referred to everything as an addiction too.
That was a long time ago, and this tweet is, I think, the first time I’ve come across the word habituation in decades. Of course, I don’t hang around in psychology circles, so maybe that’s no surprise. But I guess I’m curious about whether professionals still draw a sharp distinction between addiction and habituation, and whether it makes much difference to a layman anyway. Any psychology pros out there care to comment?
