You are a little sh*t sometimes! 
I couldn’t resist! 
Ahaha, now I’m laughing. You guys are the best. Happy Groundhog Day. 
Correct.
Doctors don’t say, “Mrs. Jones, I am afraid you have lung cancer. The most important thing to remember is that it isn’t your fault even though you smoked 5 packs a day for 30 years. It can happen to anyone.”
The disease model doesn’t take any responsibility away from the sufferer. It describes the current condition and points to both treatment and causes.
The big points for me are that alcoholism appears to be inherited even among children who never knew their biological parents, brain activity in male children of alcoholics displays abnormal pattern very early, and it is progressive. The progressive part is key to separating it from things like temper problems. If temper issues were like alcoholism, we would expect the problem to become worse and worse until the chance of someone dying was very high. It happens but the dire ending is much more predictable in alcoholics.
Moving thread from IMHO to Great Debates.
I would say that alchoholism is a disorder. It’s reconized in the DSMV. It’s not a disease, or a disablity. Question is, is it the substance that causes the probelms or more the fact that a particualr personality type tends to be attracted to alchol?
I know this has been moved from IMHO, but I am going to have to politely disagree.
I am not going to find a cite right now because sorting through Google will take a while and I have to run out for a few, but google something like “emotional maturity” and “drug addiction,” or something similar, and you’ll find hundreds of studies that have been done on drug addicts, recovering and otherwise, that shows evidence that the moment a person starts abusing a drug, their emotional aging, as it were, stops or slows significantly. If someone becomes an addict at the age of 15, and get clean at the age of 50, they will still act a lot like a teenager.
Anecdotal evidence at best, but both my father and my boyfriend, who are in recovery, had to go through with this when they got clean. It’s hard - when you spend your entire life burying your problems in drugs or alcohol instead of dealing with them, you aren’t really, you know, maturing.
Obviously, this is not a set in stone rule, but because of my father I’ve dealt with a lot of addicts in my time, practicing and recovering, and anecdotally I’d say well over half of them still hadn’t grown the hell up.
~Tasha
Thanks for brining this up. I wanted to reply to *Kalhoun ** earlier but I had a date 
. Emotional maturity is one issue that concerns alcoholics but there are other factors that appear to be genetic. This is a link to a cite that states that children of alcoholics (being a child of an alcoholic greatly increases the chances that you will become an alcoholic even if the child does not know the alcoholic parent) tend to exhibit problems like attention deficit disorder and poor impulse control. It also indicates that children of alcoholics have a weakened startle response than children of non-alcoholics. Now, this could be because the children were raised around alcoholics except there are studies showing that adopted children of alcoholics have almost a 5 fold greater chance of becoming an alcoholic than children of non-alcoholics and exhibit the same traits.
It appears from the studies done that for many alcoholics quitting drinking does not put them back to normal because they were never normal to begin with. That is where a program like A.A can help.
Slee
- This is the study I am referencing. There have been other studies as weel.
Well I’ll call bullshit right there until you can show me where anyone at AA is a qualified psychologist/psychiatrist who is actively treating patients for their genetic issues. You’re trying to lump the drunks at AA in with trained professionals and I ain’t buying it.
And I’ll add that I agree that alcoholics who start very young (like my SIL) may have stunted emotional growth. I know she certainly did. But that doesn’t explain all the drunks who function in the world and make sound, mature decisions all the time. There out there and they number in the millions. Your sweeping generalization is inaccurate.
AA is a bunch of drunks who may or may not be using who want to hang out with drunks who may or may not be using. Attaching clinical benefit to that is dangerous and misleading.
In my opinion ‘alcoholism’ and ‘stress’ have much in common.
Both are caused by something else, and both bring on other physical, social and mental problems.
Personally I think that it is counter productive to call either a ‘disease’, they are symptoms and treating symptoms but not the cause is just plain dumb. It is also an easy cop out.
As it happens, my rather foolish doctor believes that I am an alcoholic, actually I drink heavily and in private, to counteract a long term pain in my jaw.
A friend of mine had a major pain in the groin, he drank heavily. After years and a marriage breakdown a cortizone injection cured him. He remarried, all was fine, the pain came back and he was back on the vodka. He is now dead.
I know an extremely nice woman who is a pillar of the UK AA. When she and her husband were young he self-made an enormous amount of money. They had no need to work, were extremely wealthy, and mixed with a rackety international crowd. From environment and I suspect boredom, possibly also a lack of self worth, she became alcoholic - nowadays she would have been on cocaine. I have my suspicions of what was really wrong with her. The AA worked for her - I think it gave her life a meaning - looking after other people.
A doctor I know was in her first job, she found herself downing a bottle of sherry each evening (enough to knock her out). She reported herself, I’m not sure of the details. In her case it was simply that she was deeply unhappy. Twenty five later she is just fine, no problem drinking, but she was dry for a long time.
Another couple of guys home and work lives fell apart. They took to the bottle, both are dead - note alcohol did not cause their problems.
I knew a feisty woman who got her hands on a lot of money, she ran through it and at a certain stage drank very heavily. Her personality changed. She became epileptic, eventually homeless and got dried out. One day she just died. At the autopsy they found that she had a massive ‘benign’ tumour in her brain. A known and easily diagnosable cause of epilepsy - pity nobody bothered to look further than her drinking habits.
Calling alcoholism a disease is like calling flatulence a disease.
I’ve lately been kicking around the idea that support groups in general get a bad rap in some quarters just because of how their purpose is described. For whatever reason, people think of these things as hug-fests where you go to feel good about yourself and ‘let the healing begin’ or some such cliché. That makes it a lot easier for people who don’t know what they’re talking about to assume that AA and other groups are about passing the buck.
I’ve never been in recovery myself, but I’ve heard lots of first-hand stories. I can assure you that the dominant theme in addiction therapy is not “none of this is your fault, don’t blame yourself.” The theme is much closer to: “Boy, you sure fucked up. Not too late, though – you wanna fix this, or what?”
Anyway, getting back to my point, I think these kinds of support groups would be better served if they emphasized their obvious practicality. For example, when I recently decided to make a concerted effort to lose weight, I made sure to mention it to lots of friends and family. I didn’t do this for some vague feeling of moral support, and I certainly didn’t do it because I wanted to hear that I wasn’t responsible for my health. I did it because it’s a lot harder to give up on the project if I know I’m going to have to answer questions about how I’m doing. Like everyone else on the planet, I care what other people think about me; giving up reflects poorly on a person, and admiting failure to others is unpleasant. Involving others in your recovery, if nothing else, give you an additional incentive to succeed.
Ok - so why did you become a fat slob in the first place ?
A genuine question.
Jeeeez…where did THAT come from?
I’ll thank you not to make such broad statements about a program with such little evidence. AA has helped more than a few members of my family, and probably saved the life of one of my aunts, thank you very much.
:dubious:
Well, the program didn’t do shit for most of my relatives who were in it and one of them is dead due to alcoholism.
And yet many many clinicians - psychiatrists, psychologists, general practioners, recommend AA as part of a recovery effort.
I think those that recommend it as the only recovery technique are abdicting their responsibility, but it is highly recommended as part of a recovery effort.
If you go to Hazelden or The Meadows or Betty Ford, they will start you on your 12 steps as part of their program. And on leaving, if you don’t choose aftercare, you will (should) be given the meeting places and times of a local AA group and possibily even set up with a sponsor.
So the clinicians seem to think it has clinical benefit.
How did this get twisted into an AA discussion again?
And yet it doesn’t work. Its like a Hail Mary pass. We as professionals know its most likely not going to work but whats the harm in a try? Tell this poor sick suffering person that supernatural intervention will help them instead of using real behavioral understanding. Its disgusting.
I suppose I could buy that talk therapy in a controlled environment, with professionals, could be beneficial. But the way it’s presented as an independent AA-style meeting, I see no value to it as a blanket, generalized “therapy.” There’s no formal agenda, no supervision, and no formula to it. Meeting new people with like interests (i.e., sobriety) will certainly open doors to learning new habits that will promote that sobriety, but it’s certainly not something you can only get at a meeting.
Huh?