The old cravings sometimes creep up on Stevie Rojas and work on his nerves and start to hijack his brain. But he says that he’s kicked the habit — that he’s quit cryptocurrencies cold turkey. A lot of people get into crypto. Rojas did, and more: He says he got hooked on it. Rojas is an entrepreneur in his early 30s, and he began experimenting with cryptocurrencies for all the usual reasons: boredom, curiosity, fear of missing out. He started with Bitcoin and discovered he liked the rush. He progressed to Ethereum and then to more exotic tokens — ones with bigger risks and bigger thrills.
He says he spent hours a day hunting for digital treasure on his smartphone. The ups made his pulse quicken. The downs left him strung-out. He says he gave up morning prayers and time with his baby daughter. He scrolled Reddit and chased the action instead. If he wasn’t trading crypto, he was thinking about trading crypto.
Rojas became — his word — an “addict.”
And so one day last year Rojas knelt in the darkened confessional of a Roman Catholic church in Manila, where he lives. He broke down and prayed for help.
Are you gambling? the priest asked.
It’s crypto, Rojas told him.
Is it really possible to be addicted to cryptocurrency? The idea is contentious, but it isn’t far-fetched — particularly to the lucrative addiction-treatment industry. From a $90,000-a-week Swiss clinic to relatively inexpensive teletherapies, crypto, of all things, has come to rehab.
The development is, admittedly, a footnote to the grim story of addiction today. Only a tiny fraction of people who dabble in things like Bitcoin will ever face problems. And the precise clinical nomenclature is up for debate.
But both scientific understanding and popular viewpoints are shifting. Psychiatrists lately have been zeroing in on addictive disorders involving behaviors. “Gambling disorder” was only officially recognized a behavioral addiction by the U.S. medical community in the past decade (“pathological gambling,” recognized earlier, was considered an impulse-control problem). The latest edition of the American Psychiatric Association manual, sometimes referred to as the bible of psychiatry, lists an excessive preoccupation with online video games as deserving of more research.
And now a growing number of mental-health professionals are adding an asterisk to the guides to designate cryptocurrencies as a trouble spot akin to gambling, and in some ways more insidious.
Scientists have long suspected what Wall Street has always known: Our brains lust after money. The high from cocaine, the thrill of buying Dogecoin: the same reward circuits govern both. Researchers have even linked an elongated version of one neural receptor, dopamine receptor No. 4, to a tendency toward financial risk-taking.
Whatever the formal label, the problems people like Rojas have experienced reflect the convergence of powerful cultural forces. Much has been said of the supposedly addictive qualities of Robinhood, the free-trading app that’s lured millions of amateur day-traders to racy meme stocks. Many experts have drawn comparisons to gambling disorder. Underlying problems like depression or substance abuse, experts say, often make these situations worse.