However, over time addiction has evolved into a popular classification for a variety of obsessions and dependencies. It is now used as a label for everything from compulsive shopping to unhealthy relationships.
Addiction is a subject that seems to be featured heavily in media publications and on television.
A host of new books on different addiction-related illnesses recently have appeared in bookshops. According to the Health and Welfare Ministry, there were an estimated 21,000 alcoholics in the nation in 1996, an increase of about 30 percent from the corresponding figure for 1993. Although no official figures on other types of addiction have been released, addiction is a widespread problem, as illustrated by the drug-related deaths between May 1994 and June this year of three anesthetists from a hospital in Kanagawa Prefecture, who are thought to have habitually abused pharmaceutical drugs. These days the label izonsho 'addiction' is everywhere. In other words, the person experiences relief by thinking that the suffering they feel is not their fault, but rather a disease.