Carl Fisher, a professor of clinical psychiatry, writes passionately concerning those who come for help for their behavioural addictions, that they “sincerely want to stop, but feel powerless.” Defining a behavioural addiction as “an overwhelming, repetitive and harmful patter of behaviours apart from drug or alcohol abuse, Fisher hypothesizes a relationship between substance and behavioural addictions. Not only do the “two types of addictions tend to occur together,” he explains, but research seems to show that both addictions affect the same part of the brain; the reward center, as shown by fMRI scans, and can consequently be treated in similar ways. Because researchers have shown that most behavioural addictions have “underlying depression
