I’m not Shakes, but I don’t think he cares. I think he’d like to inquire about the skepticism we’re seeing surrounding the existence of functioning alcoholics. We’re having a discussion about functioning alcoholism here, and he offered his input.
Quite true.
Edit:
Stressed relationships as a result of drinking sounds dysfunctional to me. Is the “function” we’re talking about here employment only?
I don’t really. I’m bored and I find this thread entertaining is all. 
Functional alcoholic doesn’t mean you aren’t dysfunctional. It means to function. “To carry on.” Non-functional means you’ve pretty much stopped carrying on - you live to drink and have stopped (for the most part) carrying on relationships, trying to or being able to hold jobs, or your body has started to shut down
The opposite of functional here is not dysfunctional, its non-functional.
Main Entry: dys·func·tion
Variant(s): also dis·func·tion (ˌ)dis-ˈfəŋ(k)-shən
Function: noun
Date: circa 1916
1 : impaired or abnormal functioning <gastrointestinal dysfunction>
If your friend’s relationships have suffered directly as a result of her drinking, that is her relationships are healthy when she’s not drinking, and have become unhealthy *as a result of *her drinking, I’d say drinking has impaired her functioning, which is why I wouldn’t call her a functioning alcoholic. When I say “functioning,” I mean “functioning properly.”
More than anything, I’d like to know why the definition of functioning seems to be “employed” and not much else.
I don’t think there’s anything particularly idiosyncratic in the use of “functioning” in this thread. People can be “functioning depressives” and “functioning phobics” and “functioning addicts.” It just means that the thing they are struggling with isn’t so overpowering that they can’t cope and appear to have a fairly normal life.
“People might not guess that I’m an X” where “X” is whatever thing that is often or popularly thought of as incapacitating.
Generally, the job is the thing that doesn’t sit around for you and goes first. If you have a job, you can keep a roof over your head. Your relationships, those who love you, put up with a lot - so they’ll stay “functioning” for a lot longer (based on their effort, not yours). Your body usually takes a long time to give up. When you can no longer hold a job, things really fall apart. And your employer is way more likely to give up on you faster than your spouse or your mother or your best friend. You will end up living off relatives willing to enable you, or on the streets.
If you were a stay at home mom, you’d probably stop being a “functional” alcoholic when the relationships fell apart - not based on employment. When your spouse says “you are bad for the kids, get out.”
All alcoholics are dysfunctional. If they weren’t they’d just be heavy drinkers.
Moving thread from IMHO to Great Debates.
The problem is that there are too many mixed messages in society with respect to alchohol. Typical example. At new hire orientation for my job we watch a film about not showing up to work all hungover. Of course there is a company sponsored happy hour afterwards.
For a lot of people, hanging out at the bar is their primary social outlet. I almost think you have an easier time functioning in society if your are a mild alchoholic.
Well, I understand you get the tremors a lot…
That’s absolutely true. I co-facilitate a support group for sufferers of anxiety disorders; many people (almost everyone, in fact) has a phobia or two, or things that they simply refuse to do. Being phobic of spiders doesn’t mean you need treatment for an anxiety disorder. If your spider phobia never progresses, you’ll probably live just fine. If it does progress, you’re looking at anxiety disorder and possibly becoming housebound at some point. Is a simple phobia going to progress? Who knows? Is everyone who gets drunk every weekend an alcoholic? I don’t know. Some people can drink a six-pack every night and not have it affect their lives in one negative way. A lot of people can’t.
The compulsion to drink is also critical here; obsessive-compulsive people have many compulsions that don’t seem so bad on the surface, but the compulsion itself can be a problem. People don’t want to be held hostage to compulsions (and rightly so, in my opinion). If your drinking is causing no problems in your life, except you want to stop and you can’t, you still have a problem with your compulsion to drink. If you don’t want to stop, and you have no other problems (and you’re good with killing yourself early with alcohol, a known toxin), I say go right ahead.