Synthetic euphoria

Autopredation is the word carrying the definition. The euphoria is real and the source is the person's own body, so what is happening is the same predation the framework describes between people, performed on oneself. That places it alongside auto-anima, anima produced by feeding on oneself through asceticism, drugs or other attacks on one's own animus, and alongside punitive asceticism, where the target extracts anima from their own stores through punishment and shaming and experiences euphoria from the release just as predators do when anima is released from their prey. Three practices, one mechanism. The deficit is what makes it self-defeating rather than merely neutral. Simulated sources trigger the hormones experienced by contact with anima while providing none, and some cause the body to release its own stores to produce euphoria, which produces severe deanimation, and the deanimation increases the craving, which creates the addictive cycle. Marsh's account of why the routes are taken is consistent with her account of the endoself generally. People whose primary conduits have been blocked or degraded very commonly use alcohol and other drugs to provide synthetic euphoria or auto-anima, so the substance is a substitute for a connection that has been closed rather than a preference. Her general remark about the emotional will applies here, since euphoria is attained through expenditure of energy and the will that tries to conserve it produces depression instead.

Addiction neuroscience describes tolerance, withdrawal and the shift from pleasure to craving that Marsh takes as the signature, and the reward system account describes substance effects through dopaminergic signalling. The self-medication hypothesis holds that substance use often addresses underlying distress, which matches her claim that the route is taken where conduits are closed. Bruce Alexander's rat park research and Johann Hari's popularization argued that isolation rather than the substance drives addiction, which is close to her position. Her distinctive move is the unification, since treating drug use, punitive asceticism and self-harm as one mechanism operating on one substance is a claim the addiction literature does not make.