It is small wonder that the Samaritans say that 40% of all suicides are in alcoholics alone. These people have got to the state where they can no longer live with the substance - because it has caused so many problems in their lives - but they also cannot contemplate living without it. Other people can never understand that - any more than they could understand, other than intellectually, what the world looks like to someone who is colour blind.

Correspondingly, sufferers from neurotransmission disease who discover the moodaltering effects of sugar and white flour will understand each other but generally not be understood at all by people who do not have the same or similar neurotransmission defects. An addict of one kind or another will generally understand the addictive process so that an alcoholic will understand a compulsive gambler, or a drug addict understand someone with an eating disorder, but someone who has no addictive tendency in his or her fundamental nature will never understand any of them from the inside.

There will of course be some misunderstandings between sufferers from neurotransmission disease of different kinds. Alcoholics will sometimes say that people who have eating disorders have a more difficult problem because they have to eat whereas they themselves can live without alcohol. The truth is that the only substances that need to be avoided in each case, are those that have a mood-altering effect: people with eating disorders have to abstain from sugar and white flour but can eat anything else and, correspondingly, alcoholics have to abstain from anything that contains alcohol but they can - and indeed have to - drink other things such as water or milk or orange juice because otherwise they could not survive any more than someone with an eating disorder could survive totally without food.