Helen Keane

Alcohol is everywhere—in our everyday lives, in public debates and, increasingly, at the centre of public health policy. This book critically examines alcohol as a contemporary research and policy object. It argues that drinking is governed through heavily freighted concepts such as risk, wellbeing, gender and race. The authors interrogate dominant disciplinary sobriety and moderation frameworks, highlighting the overlooked aspects of sociability, pleasure and self-transformation. In scrutinizing the intensifying public health spotlight on alcohol, the authors issue a call to rethink what it means to live “well” in an era when health is both a personal imperative and a regulatory discourse.

Addicts are generally regarded with either pity or grave disapproval. But is being addicted to something necessarily bad? We categorise addiction as unnatural, diseased and self-destructive. We demonise pleasure and desire, and view the addict as physically and morally damaged. In asserting that the 'wrongness' of addiction is not fixed or indeed obvious, Helen Keane presents a refreshing challenge to more conventional accounts of addiction. She also investigates the notion that people can be addicted to eating, love and sex, just as they are to drugs and alcohol. What's Wrong with Addiction? shows that most of our ideas about addiction take certain ideals of health and normality for granted. It exposes strains in our society's oppositions between health and disease, between the natural and the artificial, between order and disorder, and between self and other.

"Keane's work is thoughtful and thought provoking and incorporates elements of medical history and philosophy."--Psychiatric Services "A theoretically engaging exploration of the arbitrariness of the field of addiction studies." --Robert Granfield, co-author of Coming Clean We assume that there is something wrong with addiction. But how exactly is it bad to be an addict? What's Wrong with Addiction? explores the ways in which our views of addiction categorize certain ways of being as unnatural, diseased, and self-destructive, often working to reinforce existing social hierarchies. Under the rubric of addiction, pleasure and desire are demonized, while the addict is viewed as damaged and in need of physical and moral rectificaiton. Keane examines the ambiguities in medical science's quest to construct addiction in chemical and biological terms, revealing the strains in the oppositions between disease and health, and addiction and normality. She demonstrates how these strains have become more insistent as the net of addiction has spread wider, moving beyond chemical substances to other problems of consumption and conduct such as compulsive eating and sex addiction. The book also critically examines the ideals of health, freedom, and happiness found in popular self-help literature, suggesting that it is the practices of self-surveillance and self-interrogation promoted in recovery guides which actually produce the inner self as an object of concern.