If you’ve googled articles on addiction, you know there are more definitions than there are addicts.
And I have indeed read some of the forums on guardyoureyes, and I was quite shocked to see what a poor understanding was being sold there.
Does pornography use correspond with “diminished recognition of significant problems with one’s behaviors and interpersonal relationships”? I don’t think we are talking about halachic problems.
And I’m not aware that it causes problems with relationships, except inasmuch as it makes your wife mad, and perhaps makes you unhappy with your wife. And certainly, if it is ruining his relationships and he is still unable to stop after he sees that, then it is probably because of an addiction. But absent that, I don’t see how it would be.
Does it correspond with a “dysfunctional emotional response”? Not that I’ve ever heard tell.
More fundamentally though, your definition leaves out a key part of what an addiction is. Your definition focuses on the irrationality of behavior–so that, if behavior is interfering with your relationships, it is probably an addiction or you would stop. This may usually be true, but falls short of defining the psyche which we may call addiction.
I think addiction is more defined by the reason you are doing the behavior, irrespective of whether it happens to be interfering with you relationships and so forth. As I noted before, the difference is whether you are doing the behavior for the normal and natural reasons that it is usually done, or to satisfy an emotional need that you have created and which is only filled by indulging in the behavior.
As is obvious, that is not usually the case with pornography.
So why do you call it a mental illness? Don’t you cheapen the problems that real addicts have when you do that? Don’t you harm the efforts of people to conform their actions to halacha when you misconstrue the problem they have?