Having attended thousands of AA meetings, I would like to offer some observations about AA and the various debates about its effectiveness.
For many people, including folks like DangleYourModifier, attending a few AA meetings is very useful regardless of whether they decide to stick with it or not. DYM is unsure of what his relationship to alcohol is. AA meetings are full of people who have struggled with the same question. While their answers may be biased toward concluding that anyone who drinks and has problems is an alcoholic, in my experience veteran AA folks are usually interested in letting the newcomer reach his own conclusions based on his experiences and what he hears at the meetings. AA in my experience has not been interested in defining alcoholism at the individual level. If a person decides that there is a relationship in his life between alcohol and problems, AA will definitely advise that total abstinence is the answer, and will offer advice and help aimed at achieving abstinence.
AA is not a treatment program. It does not claim to be something that can be “done” to a person. It is a fellowship. It is notoriously difficult to analyze statistically in a way that is acceptable to those who feel that their sobriety is in some way a result of the program of AA. I think that scientists recognize these difficulties.
One of the difficulties is defining a population of people who have “tried” AA. Back in the early 80s, court systems began “sentencing” people to attend AA. This caused huge issues within AA groups. AA had, before that time, been almost entirely voluntary. People who showed up at their first meeting were usually at a point of desperation. While some may have come to placate someone in their lives, most were there because they had reached the end of their ropes. When the courts began requiring AA attendance, groups had major discussions about whether to sign “court slips” or not. Some groups decided not to sign, other agreed to sign and became slip-signing mills. Some committed members turned away from these groups, while others decided that it was their mission to try to help those who showed up involuntarily. All of this is a long way of asking “who do you count as having attended AA for some period of time?” Does someone who attended three meetings a week for a year as part of a probation agreement count?
For me, the suggestion that anyone who has questions about their relationship with alcohol attend a few AA meetings is sound advice that doesn’t need any science to back it up. Whether or not AA can be regarded as a successful program for helping people abstain from drinking, it certainly is a way to talk to some people who have grappled with alcohol as a problem. This seems to me to be a useful thing even for those who end up deciding that AA is a crock. In AA I have heard a lot about “functional alcoholics”. These are folks who are considered by people in AA to be alcoholics, but who through force of will or whatever means manage to achieve and maintain success in life without abstaining. I have known lots of people like this. Some of them have attended AA for a while, learned a lot about alcohol from it, and moved on. Some have occasional issues with alcohol. For all I know, some may be white-knuckling their way through life. It doesn’t matter.
When anyone asks me questions that approach the issue of “am I an alcoholic”, I suggest that they attend some AA beginners’ meetings. Not because I have judged that they are alcoholics, or because I am certain that AA will be the solution to whatever is wrong in their lives that makes them ask the questions, but so that they can answer the questions for themselves with a few data points outside of their own experience.
And to sleestak, my experience with AA over the years has somehow made it easy for me to understand why some people have negative feelings toward it. First, for many years, people were forced to go. There was a Supreme Court ruling that made mandatory attendance illegal, but probation officers still seem to want evidence of attendance in my neck of the woods, because I still see people getting slips signed at meetings. Second, there is the religious/spiritual aspect. That just pisses some people off. Third, there is the cultish aspect of the whole thing, the slogans, the assurances that you just need to keep coming to meetings and working the steps and something will happen. And last, for now, there are the eternal and probably unanswerable questions of if and how it works at all. Besides pointing me at the How It Works statement in the Big Book, I had several brief conversations early in my sobriety that went like this:
Me: But how does it (the AA program) work?
Veteran: Just fine.
Me: ??%^###??
Crotalus, sober in AA for a long time