Quote - It just seem to me that we're expending an excessive amount of energy, and ruminating in a long and effusive manner, about something of very little importance.
dph

It's one post out of dozens over the past few days. Do what I do--ignore posts you're not interested in reading--unless you have an addictive personality... Are there any forum anonymous programs to help us?

Quote -
Someday someone will draw a big chart of disorders represented by circles and someone will notice that all the circles overlap and that every conceivable personality trait falls within one of the circles.
They will also discover that there is a medication designed to treat all of the circles.

From what I've read, they use an OCD medication. Unlike physical dependencies, which have drug treatments tailored to the specific addictive substance, psychological addictions have one course of treatment. That would pretty much indicate that there is only one problem--and it's not what the person is addicted to.

The ability to highly focus on a single task is not in and of itself a bad thing. Without it, we probably wouldn't have cars, buildings and all the accoutrements of civilization. I sure as hell want the guy, designing a new bridge, to be especially obsessive about doing it right. I'd be a lot less comfortable if it were being done by a hyperactive person who cannot maintain attention on a task for more than a few minutes. Without creative people having a passionate focus on various entertainment arts, we'd still be picking fleas off one another for fun. We also wouldn't have some of the cool Poser figure remaps that DP's given us. It's important to have people who are highly driven to find solutions and create new things. OCD is a real disorder that is probably the ability to concentrate gone haywire--somewhat akin to allergies being the immune system out of control.

There seems to be differences between a creative obsession and many other obsessions. An artist is making something new and controlling the results of the obsession. It's a very productive obsession. It's also mostly a solitary passion. Most other addictions seem to be passive in nature to some degree. They're also often socially structured. People who spend way too much time watching sports and observing religions are doing so in a social fashion where what they are doing allows them to participate in a larger group structure. The effort they put into that structure allows them to conform and be a greater part of it and--if the most knowledgeable one in that subject, to even control some aspect of it. Collecting hobbies are a little less social, but are still a bit about control. Collecting is about completing a sequence and restoring an order to a small corner of a chaotic world. It's a little more OCD oriented. A lot of collecting is about showing off what's been collected and that becomes part of one's social fabric.
 

My visual indexes of Poser content are at http://www.sharecg.com/pf/rgagnon