Yes. If my loved one was a diabetic and refused to check their blood levels, the solution isn’t to throw your hands in the air and let them die.
Getting a sick person to take the first step is difficult to impossible when the sickness is mental.
There’s only so much you can do. If the person with the illness refuses to take care of themselves/take the appropriate medication, do you advocate strapping them to the bed and forcing the pills down their throat?
Yes, mental illness is a bitch, I get that. But if someone knows they have a mental illness and refuses to take care of it (or worse, uses alcohol as their medicine) there’s not a whole hell of a lot you can do.
There’s a fine line between support and enabling.
And that’s the point I was at towards the end of our cohabitation. He was unemployed, and so he would drink during the day. The longest period that he was “clean” was after he had to go to the doctor because of liver / kidney issues. The doctor essentially told him that continued alcohol use (of any degree) would put him on the road to an early grave. For a few weeks, he seemed to really take those words to heart, but as he started feeling better (due to the sobriety), he thought that he would be okay to drink again. (Much like a person who is on medication starts feeling better, so they don’t think they need it anymore, when it’s the medication that is what’s keeping them from becoming ill again)
Initially, when he was in his “clean and sober” phases, he would either hide the liquor or lie about his sobriety. Then, he lied and said the doctor gave him permission to drink again, and I just went with it, realizing there’s nothing I could do.
We’d had numerous “interventions,” serious talks, etc., and he would promise that he was going to change. Multiple times, he would pour his alcohol down the drain, in a show of remorse / act of good faith. One time, I came home to find him drunk, the day he weepily admitted that he needed to stop drinking.
Due (in small part) to his drinking, and other life choices, his friends dwindled down to (honestly) just me, and there were times that I really wondered if we would be nearly as close if we didn’t live together. As his social circle shrank, he would get depressed, mopey, and seek solace in the bottom of the bottle.
He would always find a reason to be upset - his love life, he hated his job, he was unemployed, etc. - and therefore drink.
Once I realized I wasn’t his keeper, and that he was a grown adult who was going to do whatever it was that he wanted, my life became much easier. He was (and is) still my friend, but I could not control his decisions, and it was starting to take a toll on me.
Yes. From our point of view, you are the one who is suffering and reaching out for help. Al-Anon is a good place to get what you need.
Should you ever have the chance to try again, maybe suggest to him that there’s nothing to stop him from getting help at the same time as continuing to drink.
If he drinks because he’s depressive, then the problem isn’t the drinking, it’s the depression. If you treat the depression, his emotional dependency on liquor will go down. That doesn’t mean that his addiction to liquor will go down, just that at least one possible source of dependency will be diminished. It has some chance of being the key ingredient to allowing him to move away from the alcohol.
!! IANAD !! If you think he’s depressive, you could suggest that he gives St. John’s Wort a try. If you think he’s got a borderline personality disorder, lithium orotate might help. Both are off-the-shelf “supplements” that seem to be, effectively, as strong as some prescription-only medications. So he wouldn’t even need to see a doctor, just pop onto Amazon or a nutrition store and give it a few weeks to see if he’s feeling better. And if he does, that would be a good hook for him to start seeing a therapist or someone else (areligious) who could help him to figure out what he needs to do, to not need the alcohol. Though, again, I am not a doctor, so do be careful with layman’s diagnoses and off-the-shelf self-medicating. But, in his case, it sounds like he’s pretty well screwed regardless of anything, so it might be worth the try.
No, I’m honestly fine with it. The only reason I went into greater detail was because I didn’t want to be classified as someone who turns his back on their friends at the first sign of difficulty.
There’s another secular group called smartrecovery.org. They have both online and real-world meetings and it’s based on CBT/REBT principles. I’ve known several people who have gotten valuable help from them. It’s free, other than they do ask for whatever you can contribute at the in-person meetings.
Not for having it. But if they refuse to accept that there are times it’s a problem, and to take steps to avoid it being a problem, then yes.
It’s not the first time you walk into a thread to insult the OP, therefore I consider I’m within my rights to judge you a threadshitter. That’s completely unrelated to whether you have any kind of mental illness.
Calatin, stay healthy. Best wishes for you and anybody else who cares for this guy, whether a lot or a little.
Calatin, I’m so sorry this mess has touched you and all those other people. It’s very sad and can be very frustrating.
I’m sure people can wind up having helpful influences on the addictions of others, but it is also a very uncertain business, and difficult to know in advance whether any particular effort will improve the situation or perhaps make it even worse. Yes, alcoholism is a disease, but it is also a disease people can get yelled at for having, one that sufferers can sometimes decide not to let do any harm. Some alcoholics stop drinking and wind up with very nice lives. Nobody knows how to get a given drinker to accomplish this, though. Addictions are sledgehammers that smash lives from inside and outside. Good luck to you and everybody else near this one!
But no throwing up of hands has happened here. Alcoholism is an addiction, sure, but the addict is far from helpless.
What Qadgop said.
Just tell him that you think it would be best to stop drinking, he should go to AA, or whatever else you think would be in his best interest…
But if he does not listen to your advice, then THERE IS NOTHING MORE YOU CAN DO! Forgetaboutit!
I was involved with an active alcoholic and went to Alanon and found it very helpful. Suggest you go just to clear your head.
This is the best thing I learned and it’s the reason you shouldn’t try to “help”:
When you get between the alcoholic and his (I know women are alcoholics, too, but the OP is referring to a male friend) drinking, you prevent him from experiencing the consequences of his drinking directly. You get in the middle and then it seems to him that his suffering, trouble, pain, misery are your fault.
*“My drinking is only a problem because YOU think it’s a problem! If you didn’t get on my back about it, it wouldn’t BE a problem!” *
When you get out of the picture and stop helping, and indeed, REFUSE to help, then he is forced to be alone with the problem. When there is no one around to blame, then there is a sliver of a chance that he might see that HE has a problem and it is HIS alone.
As long as someone is “helping,” he is shielded from seeing that. Hard hard lesson for the friend/loved one.
Back then I spent a lot of time on this boardand got some good information.
What the?? If you have some sort of problem with me, I guess I missed the pit thread. Please stop following me around.
Thanks for calling me a threadshitter for giving my 2 cents. Your contributions were much more valuable I’m sure.
If he had a seizure, doesn’t that mean he was trying to quit? Seizures happen during withdrawal, not during drinking.
I’d feel very sorry for the poor man. We have NO effective treatment for this common and devastating illness. AA does not work-it’s been shown to be completely ineffective, as has pretty much every other therapy method ever tried for the disease, so it’s not hard to agree with afflicted individuals who refuse to use these ineffective and often offensive so-called “treatments.” Some people can manage to quit through sheer will power but these people are few and far between. If society can stop thinking about this as a moral problem and instead move on to thinking of it as an actual disease we might make some progress in treating it.
There are some medications that help some people. At least he’s in the hospital and they can treat his withdrawal symptoms. Maybe just providing some friendship and support will be helpful.
They can happen from binge drinking as well. Its a symptom of alcohol poisoning.
Wait, I thought friendship and advice was completely ineffective? What exactly do you think happens in AA and other treatment programs? To the extent that they’re effective, it’s because of the friendship and advice.
It’s pointless to advocate for AA, I know, not to mention contrary to AA tradition. But stuff like this just makes me mad. I hope to hell no one tell’s the OP’s friend not to bother with these completely ineffective programs. God forbid one of them might save his life.