If you have a crisis addict in your life, January is probably one of the worst months of your year. You are likely to be feeling exhausted from the emotional effort of rescuing the crisis addict from an improbable succession of mishaps. Crisis addicts seem to attract more than their fair share of accident, fire, pestilence, negative interplanetary confluence and general personal tragedy. And Christmas is their most crisis-ridden time of year because family and social gatherings provide an ideal audience. Like lambs to the slaughter, sympathisers gather round the crisis addict, who entertains them with a litany of personal disasters, with no detail too intimate or embarrassing to reveal.
Not only do more bad things seem to happen to crisis addicts, but those things that do happen to them seem worse. Every wart is a skin cancer. Every fenderbender is a near-death experience. Every minor row becomes Armageddon. Yet the "victim" has no sense of personal responsibility in creating these catastrophes. With their alarmist attitude of impending doom, they create tension throughout a family, especially at holiday gatherings. The arrival of a relative is a crisis. Dropping someone at the airport is a crisis. Crisis addicts seem congenitally incapable of seeing the world in any other way. The crisis addict is always scanning the horizon for new calamities to embrace, so that every family or social gathering is an opportunity for the crisis addict - who tends to be self-centred or even paranoid - to feel slighted and thus justified in putting emotional wounds on display. Yet at the same time the crisis addict seems incapable of empathising with the experiences of others. The only anguish they can feel is their own. Crisis addiction is not an official syndrome, but it seems a suitable label for this way of being because, like alcoholics and drug addicts, crisis addicts seem to get such an auto-erotic high from each new crisis that they will get themselves into all kinds of scrapes to keep the buzz going.
Crisis addiction is similar to substance addiction, too, in that the crisis addict's friends and relations become "co-dependent" - to use a word from the addiction counselling literature - in that they feel responsible for the crisis addict's problems and are willing to play the hero. This can mean "rescuing" the addict by providing money, housing and other interventions, although often it is a matter of being available at the end of a telephone line 24 hours a day to listen to the crisis addict's ongoing saga of misery.
Research into personality and genetics has recently found that this propensity towards living a life of soap opera seems to run in families. It is a fact, unfortunately, that some people have more "stressful life events" (SLEs) than others. Twenty per cent of the tendency to have a higher number of SLEs is accounted for by genetic factors, and a further 20 per cent is explained by environmental and/or familial factors. In other words, drama queens tend to breed miniature versions of themselves, who in turn grow up to repeat the behaviour. Sadly, many such adults were so emotionally neglected as children that only grand gestures - like being carted off to casualty after falling from the shed roof - gained them attention. A study of 2,315 pairs of twins at the Medical College of Virginia in Richmond, concluded that "while neither genes nor familial environment is likely to directly produce life events, personal and social factors that predispose to life events are substantially influenced by an individual's genetic and family background. These results, which suggest that stressful life events reflect more than random influences, may have important implications for our understanding of the relationship between stressful life events and psychopathology."
There is now a large body of evidence from twin and adoption studies linking genetic variation to personality. According to "Experience Producing Drive Theory" (how genes drive experience and shape personality), individuals unquestionably influence the nature of their experiences. For example, high-sensation seekers surround themselves with like-minded peers and seek out quite different experiences than low-sensation seekers. Research on female twins has found that, in women, the genetic risk factors for major depression also increase the probability of experiencing SLEs in interpersonal and occupational/financial domains. "Genes can probably impact on the risk for psychiatric illness by causing individuals to select themselves into high-risk environments," according to Prof Kenneth Kendler of the Medical College of Virginia. In the case of many crisis addicts, the psychiatric illness involved is personality disorder, of which there are several types, among them "narcissistic" and "borderline". The personality-disordered are unable to see how their behaviour affects others. They are equally powerless to make the emotional connections for themselves, so that they are unlikely to comprehend the consequences of their actions, and therefore make the same mistakes over and over again.
Those with narcissistic personality disorder are self-centred and believe themselves to be superior. Because they regard their own problems and ambitions as paramount, they are willing to manipulate and even destroy others in order to meet their own needs. People with borderline personality disorder - which mostly affects women - are impulsive in areas that have a potential for self-destruction. Relationships with others are intense and unstable, and the person will go through frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment by others, and express mood instability and inappropriate anger.
While mercurial, such people may be exceptionally successful, especially in areas such as politics and the arts, where pursuing an ambition or a passion - while flagrantly ignoring the needs of others - may be richly rewarded. But they may also experience depression, caused by the constant stress of their lives, warns Dr Veronica O'Keane, a psychiatrist at Beaumont Hospital, Dublin. "A person who is a risk-seeker, or has a personality that seeks out a lot of change and needs distraction - either because they have a sensation-seeking personality or because they suffer from emotional insecurity and emptiness - is vulnerable to depression. And in treating these people you can't just give them anti-depressants, you have to look at the behaviour as well. To an extent, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy that they will be depressed because of the sort of people they are and the behaviours they are indulging in," she says.
"We tend to think that people in power are high achievers who cope brilliantly with stress, but this is not necessarily true," she points out. "You could be successful because you are personality disordered in a very stressful environment. The behavioural patterns of some leaders suggest that they have aberrant personalities, sometimes amounting to a frank personality disorder. Perhaps the `selection' of these individuals, in a Darwinian sense, reflects the hostile and dehumanising environments that they flourish in. The moral of the story is that we create our own world, really."
Not everyone who has experienced a tragic or dramatic life is a crisis addict, and there are many genuine cases - such as divorce, bereavement and financial ruin - that deserve our sympathy. Marie Murray, head of psychology at St Vincent's Psychiatric Hospital in Dublin, says that "those in genuine tragic distress over a series of events outside their control need all the support and practical help we can give".
However, "there is another group of people who tend to interpret the normal or more stressful vicissitudes of life as catastrophic, and therefore stagger from one apparent crisis to another, either because they cannot cope or because they interpret normal misfortunes as crises to which everyone must respond. They seek love and understanding through trying to evoke the sympathy of others. While one may be sympathetic to their distress, it is not wise to get sucked in to a co-dependent, copathologising role with them because it benefits neither - least of all the respondent," she warns. "What is more useful is to support sufficiently to make them aware of their hidden capacities to cope or to encourage them to seek help in the correct places rather than alienating or exhausting friends," she suggests.
At the most extreme end of the spectrum, there are the hard-core crisis addicts who simply cannot live any other way than from one catastrophe to the next. If you have such a person in your life, "handle with care because one can get sucked in to their life and not lead one's own life as a result," Murray advises.
"Keep conversations with them light, help them to laugh at some of the normal bumpiness of life and make more contact and reward when they are not in a crisis phase than when they are, so that they will become more confident and know that they can receive attention without creating a rumpus," she recommends.
Whatever you do, be aware when you are genuinely helping and when you yourself are addicted to other people's crises. "Pathological helpers seek and find the crisis addicts, and sometimes this may stem from a childhood experience of being rewarded for helping. Often for such children love was conditional on pleasing. Many good people are among these ranks, but they exhaust themselves in the process and often do not know how to look for help when they themselves require it," adds Murray. So if you are currently suffering from somebody else's crisis addiction, think about disentangling yourself. You may be part of the problem.