hink of addiction and smoking, drugs and, maybe, gambling come to mind. What about Internet and cyber sex? Hardly top the list, do they? Financial disorders? Highly improbable. As for sexual anorexia, most people have probably never heard the term.

For all those hooked on addictions, the Fairmont Hamilton Princess Hotel was the place to be, between March 31 and April 2.

The aptly titled Multi Addictions Conference would have provided ... the ultimate fix.

Every conceivable addiction issue was covered: eating disorders; sexual abuses ? from sexual anorexia and abuses; the question of what is addiction; financial disorders; the effects of substance abuse on the family; Internet and cyber sex; the effects of addiction on the brain; spirituality and recovery; the nature of effective recovery; and numerous other topics.

Director of Court Service and chairperson of the Multi Addictions Conference Gina Hurst-Maybury said she believed that they had fulfilled their charge.

?It has been an overwhelming success in the amount of people who came,? she said.

?People have either been experiencing problems and they want to come together to get things moving, so that we can heal this community. The end result is another step towards that.?

Mrs. Hurst-Maybury added that the Department was planning to host similar conferences in the near future.

?We are also going to put some structure in ensuring that we reach the people who are really plagued by addiction,? she said. ?So, this is equipping us and giving everyone who wanted to be here a better understanding ? a focus for where we are going in the future.

?It is bridging the gap between the private and the public sector, bringing in the faith based community and separate issues of separating church and state.

?But as a community we are all impacted by it and this is the time that we are coming together. We have to broaden our horizons as well, sometimes by opening some wounds and we had a crisis room set up start to deal with their issues.

?We are going in the right direction, because many have not seen a conference of this magnitude before.?

Some of the speakers included Dr. Patrick Carnes, who is an expert in addiction and recovery techniques; Dr. Donald Vereen, who specialises in the effects of substance abuse on the brain; Toronto Police detective sergeant Paul Gillespie, who is in the Sex Crimes Unit and is constantly monitoring people who purchase child pornography; Terrence Gorski, who is a pioneer in the development of relapse prevention therapy; Julie Holland, who has been dealing with self-esteem, eating and body image issues for both adults and adolescents for 23 years; and Andrew Osborne, who is the director of the Training Institute of the National Development and Research Institutes and is also director of the Training and Dissemination Core of the Center of Drug Use and HIV Research.

Also speaking were Dr. Kenneth D. Robinson, is a teacher and lecturer on cognitive behavioural treatment and correctional counselling; Dr. Charles Walker is a clinical psychologist, a marriage and family therapist, a professional counsellor and a certified sex addiction therapist; psychologist Dr. Robin Wilson, Salvation Army Major Alfred Wilson, who brought a spiritual and practical application to the Twelve Steps Programme, Judge Karen Freeman Wilson, who is the chief executive officer of the National Association of Drug Court Professionals; and Guy A. Wheeler, specialises in personal therapy, programme consulting, and professional training for both adults and juveniles.

Through research, Dr. Donald Vereen has discovered a change in the brain?s pleasure centre and he believes that substance abuse should be treated as a brain illness.

?It is a medical issue also,? he said, ?So, why is that ignored?

?The reason that it is ignored as being medical is because it exhibits itself as a behaviour, so drug addiction is a brain disease expressed through behaviour in a social context.?

Toronto Police detective sergeant Paul Gillespie heads a department of 17 officers, whose only job is to look at internet and cyber sex crimes against children.

They go on chat rooms for teens and pre-teens and pose as children in order to catch paedophiles.

They also scan pictures of child pornography in an attempt to rescue the children and catch the offenders.

He said: ?It is our findings that at least 30 percent of people who possess it or buy it are active hands on abusers. So we pay real special attention to it.

?Some people do just sit around and look at it and some just do.?

Det. Sgt. Gillespie added that the big problem with these images of child pornography or images of child abuse is that they are really crime scene photographs.

?It is a terrible time in a child?s life when they are being horribly abused or tortured and there are about five to six-hundred-thousand different pictures on the internet right now involving between 50 and 100,000 different kids world wide,? he said.

?And with all the best efforts of law enforcement in the whole world, we have only identified about 100 of these kids.

?The FBI and the National Crime Squad, in the United Kingdom, the Police in Canada, less than 500 of at least 500,000 kids have been identified, which is horrific and that is why were not giving up.?

Dr. Patrick Carnes works with both sexually addicted patients and those with financial disorders. He has found that most addictive problems stem from trauma.

?I work on the sexual side of it and I deal with sexual addiction and sexual anorexia,? he said.

?Forty percent of my patients are men, who have an avoidance of sex, it is like in the eating disorder if you have people who compulsively overeat, but are anorexic for food, then you have the binge purge people ? so you have both sides.

?It is the same family of illnesses. The same thing happens in sex addiction and people who compulsively avoid intimacy and sex, you have people who are out of control and cannot stop and there are people who go back and forth. They are coming out of the same parts of the brain, so we are beginning to learn more about that.?

Terrence T. Gorski blames ?the belief that people become addicted because they are bad people or the belief that addiction is caught up with sin and repentance? are the cause of a re-introduction of a horrible stigma against alcoholism and drug dependency in the United States.

?When I entered the field in 1969 the biggest problem we faced was stigma,? he said, ?Which stopped the family from seeking help early when they were most treatable. I?m sorry to report to you today that due to the addiction policy most people are reluctant to seek help during the early stages of addiction, as they are being punished rather than helped.

?The thing that excites me about being here (In Bermuda) is the sponsorship of the Drug Courts. I am a strong believer that there does need to be an effective connection or an interface between the criminal justice system and the treatment community. ?And that effective connection needs to rest primarily in the Drug Court programme and if we look at each individual case and say whether this person would be best treated in a community based programme or is this person going to be a danger to society by separating that person in a prison setting.

?By getting as many people into recovery treatments as possible then minimises the number of addicts in prison, because prison itself damages people and they tend to leave prison with more problems than they had when they went in.?