A 42-year-old Swedish man named Roger Tullgren managed to get the state to grant him a disability pension. The cause? His addiction to heavy metal.
This may seem like a joke, but it is totally true. The man claimed that his addiction to this music prevented him from working in almost any job. Not only because he placed all his concentration on music and was unable to abandon it to perform other tasks. Also because he attended about 300 concerts a year.
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Obviously, at first he was taken as a joke. However, after reading the reports of three different psychologists, the Swedish justice system granted him a pension of 400 euros per month.
Of course, you are not declared totally incapable of working. Therefore, he was helped to find a part-time job that was compatible with his addiction to heavy metal.
That’s how he ended up working as a dishwasher at a restaurant. His boss allows him to wear metal clothing and listen to whatever music he wants while doing his job. This way, you can supplement those 400 euros and have enough money to live on. And to pay for more concerts, since, as he himself declared in an interview in 2016, heavy metal is his life.
Can you have an addiction to heavy metal?
Before talking about heavy metal addiction, we should take a step back and check if a person can be addicted to music.
If we stick to psychology manuals, the quick answer is no. However, it is true that there are points in which one could speak of something similar to an addiction.
To begin with, we know that addictions are caused by excessive stimulation of the brain’s reward systems. This is a physiological response that occurs to generate pleasure in the face of stimuli that are evolutionarily beneficial.
For example, sex is pleasurable because it helps perpetuate the species. That feeling of pleasure is due to dopamine, which is released by this stimulus so that we want to do it again.
The same thing happens with the intake of high-calorie foods. They may not be healthy, but they give us energy and that is what our brain interprets as it drives the release of dopamine.
Unfortunately, some harmful substances or habits can also stimulate reward systems. There are people who are especially sensitive, so they repeat the stimulus over and over again, so that each time they want more and more.
This is how addictions begin. It has been seen that people who feel chills when listening to music experience them precisely because of a release of dopamine.