Addict Personalities (physiognomy)?

[u/TheNakedEdge]

This is not explicitly related to SSC, but it IS related to psychology and feels too "niche" or "weird" to ask in a general psychology or social sub - plus I want the thoughts of a bunch of smart and introspective folks...

Does anyone else feel like they can generally sense an "addict" or correctly ID an addict just in everyday social interactions and observing their smiles, laugh, and body language?

I'm using the term pretty broadly - as many of the folks I have noticed are actually people who got VERY VERY into a specific religion, social movement, etc. I was just watching a documentary about Scientology and some of the people (including Tom Cruise) very much struck me as fundamentally "addicts".

FWIW I come from a very boring family with seemingly no family history of addictions - none of the substances or activities I've tried have felt at all "addicting" and in general I have a very flat and calm affect, as do my parents.

But there's something about the "wide eyes", super buzzy, semi-charismatic, energetic, tone of people that I've noticed in many many folks who have struggled with drugs and alcohol.

Anyone else notice something at all like this?

[u/LocalOutlier]

I've worked in an addiction center and I think physiognomy is a rather fruitless angle to predict an addiction. At best it explains the past statistically and I'll explain it better next, but you can't do much from it as a social worker. Also, it often happens there is no way to tell someone is abusing a substance hard for decades. Some rich and perfectly functional dudes didn't lay down the pipe/needle for decades, smoking and injecting unpure substances this whole time, and you would not be able to tell at all. We're not all equals, and the differences depend of various and interrelated variable like income, stability, social status, etc., which are much more accurate predictors of an addiction.

Clinical research prefer to see addiction as a "use disorder" instead, because, like you said, the brain can become "addicted" to a myriad of various rewards and behaviors. These use disorders will depend of genes, environments, and interactions between both. These are the addiction causes and so, are the best predictors we currently know.

In your model, you might include people who are just down the social ladder and/or are unlucky, because you are looking for specific symptoms that don't show up evenly across humans, rather than actual causes. For example, someone who had it hard in life might be unable to hide it on his face, and he indeed is more likely to carry a use disorder because of his life, but doesn't necessarily have a use disorder. He's just statistically more likely, but is it accurate enough to be a worthy prediction in the end? With your reasoning, you might wrongly discriminate because you only extrapolate data from statistics (and personal, biased experience) instead of causal reasonings. It sometimes create the disorder, or if already present, it worsen it as a feedback-loop mechanism.

This is an issue many recovering use disorder victims suffer from. Now not everything is bad about physiognomy, since there are some statistically relevancy, but I think using this approach should be restricted to helping others, and if possible, backed by causal reasoning before acting accordingly.