as a shameless plug, might I mention y’all might also be interested in this thread
I wanted to talk about these movies, so: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=7183061#post7183061
When you’re skiing, part of the fun is the risk factor. Now, one could argue that drunken stair walking is also a sport, but if you injure yourself it’s because you failed at a simple task, which is different from a moment of imprecision resulting in a skiing accident. The risk then is not so much that you are taking on a challenging task, it’s that you are stuggling so much to overcome your own ineptitude at walking. And that ineptitude is self-inflicted.
I recently spoke with a friend who is planning to set up the Drunk Olympics in which people get drunk and then attempt simple tasks (like riding a bike). Then everyone gathers around and laughs at the drunks. So there’s an element of “patheticness” to it all.
Well, for starters, black outs are a sign of brain damage, IIRC from one of my college courses. It’s not a good sign.
Second, I have a relative who died after years of alcohol abuse. My godmother and favorite aunt, leaving two children behind. She had just gotten sober, but she was still weak from all the years of drinking, she got sick, and it killed her. Her two-year-old daughter spent that day watching her mother vomit blood, and later, trying to wake up her corpse. She left my grandparents bitter and miserable, and a family that misses her dreadfully.
And while I was too young to know all the details, I do know that despite her drinking, she was a wonderful and loving human being.
Now you come here and tell me that there’s nothing wrong with being an alcoholic.
:mad:
addressing alcoholism, or alcohol dependence syndrome, in the thread I linked to above, I posted this:
From this website , we get
the International Classification of Diseases, 9th Revision (ICD-9) (World Health Organization 1978), the proposed ICD-10 (Grant 1989), and the revised editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III and DSM-III-R) (American Psychiatric Association 1980, 1987), have incorporated the concept of the alcohol dependence syndrome. This term was introduced by Edwards and Gross (1976), who thought the diagnostic use of the term “alcoholism” was overinclusive and influenced by the normative concept of disease (that is, the concept of disease as influenced by prevailing social mores and values). In contrast, the concept of alcohol dependence syndrome is based on a more specific formulation that a clinical phenomenon, distinct from but not mutually exclusive of alcohol-related disabilities(4), can be recognized and exists in degrees of severity. According to Edwards and Gross (1976), the alcohol dependence syndrome is defined by the following seven criteria:
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narrowing of the drinking repertoire (involving the establishment of daily drinking patterns and selective choices of alcoholic beverages)
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salience of alchol-seeking behavior
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increased tolerance to alcohol’s effects
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repeated withdrawal symptoms
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drinking to relieve or avoid withdrawal symptoms
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subjective awareness of a compulsion to drink
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reinstatement of established drinking patterns following a period of abstinence.
These seven characteristics of alcohol dependence lie at the heart of all currently used and proposed diagnostic criteria
thetruewheel:
OK, fess up, everybody. I’m not the only person who read these paragraphs and visualized a drunken thetruewheel arriving here, precariously balanced, on his skateboard, right?
I’m not sure why this is Pit worthy but here goes:
The problem with being a drunk or an alchoholic is the very fact that they DO often behave in a way that isn’t acceptible - they get loud or obnoxious, fight, break or steal stuff, have sex with people they wouldn’t normally or shouldn’t have sex with (like someone who’s not their wife). The might miss work, get drunk at work, show up so hungover they can’t function or lose important work-related items (like their laptop). They can be unreliable. They can be embarassing with the drama they create. They can force their friends into the awkward position of having to care for them or provide them medical attention. They can be disgusting - often vomiting, urinating and crapping where they shouldn’t. They can get into legal troubles. And sometimes, they just act like assholes.
Now I’m not so naive to say that you should never drink to excess. We as a culture celebrate excessive drinking. It’s an integral part of young adult culture. That’s what we do. We work all week and Thursday through Friday we all meet up at the bars or some house party to have a few drinks.
On the other hand, if EVERY saturday or sunday you can barely get out of bed you are generally getting a lot of shit or are embarrassed for things you did the night before you might want think about taking it easy for awhile.
And if you find that you are having trouble taking it easy, you might have a problem.
It’s possible to be a functional alcoholic, what some might just call a heavy drinker. I’ve known a couple of them, people who are able to drink a lot but it doesn’t really interfere with their life. Problem is, they’re the exception, not the norm.
In my experience (nearly 30 years sober), most alcoholics are people whose drinking does not just affect themselves. It affects friends, family members, employers, basically anyone they come into contact with. It costs us all vast amounts of money in terms of health costs, social welfare costs, etc., for the typical alcoholic who doesn’t get sober – and the worst part of it is that people who are severe alcoholics usually refuse to admit their problems. I have a sober friend who visits drunks at his local county hospital every month, and he regularly sees people only a few hours from death for alcohol-related problems who assure him, “I’m not that bad off.”
There are some people who make it to very high positions and remain alcoholics – because as I’ve heard explained by a doctor, professional knowledge is just about the last part of the brain to be affected by alcoholism. After she got sober, this doctor went back and reviewed every case she’d treated for the last year, and found that she had done a good job in every one of them. And yet she was incredibly physically ill from the effects of alcohol.
Bottom line: Alcohol in large quantities just isn’t good for you. If you can handle it, hats off to you. The vast majority of people can’t, and as a result ruin everything they touch. Especially their children – alcoholism is a vicious cycle, with an astonishing number of children of alcoholics turning into alcoholics themselves because they never learned how to act like adults since their alcoholic parent was so emotionally stunted.
Well, as Robert Sherwood, a speechwriter in FDR’s White House said about Churchill’s visit:
And as an official in the British Foreign Office said about a lunch with him:
[quote]
A varied and noble procession of wines with which I could not keep pace — Champagne, port, brandy, Cointreau: Winston drank a good deal of all, and ended with two glasses of whiskey and soda.
[quote]
The man drank a lot.
Of course, if being an alcoholic never caused you problems and never caused the people in your life any problems, then there’d be no problem being an alcoholic.
But that’s like asking, “What’s wrong with car accidents? I mean, what if you were in a car accident, but no one got hurt, and your car wasn’t damaged, and no other property was damaged, and no animals got run over?” Yeah, I’ve been in car accidents where nothing happened…my car spun out on some ice, but there was no traffic and I regained control of the car, and there were no negative consequences.
The trouble is that car accidents USUALLY cause negative consequences. And so does alcoholism. Sure, there are people who can drink heavily all their lives and never harm themselves (much) or the people around them (much). But for every heavy drinker who has things mostly under control there are 10 heavy drinkers who tell themselves they have things mostly under control when they are actually out of control. Yeah, there’s some selection bias…people who drink but don’t screw up their lives don’t make the news. People who drink and plow their car into a busload of schoolchildren do, people who drink until their liver is swiss cheese do, people who choke to death on their own vomit do, people who drink and become violent do, people who drink so much they lose their job do.
So yeah, if alcohol doesn’t cause any problems then alcohol isn’t a problem. Circular argument. But alcohol frequently causes problems.
My mother was a bright. attractive woman who functioned reliably as an executive administrative assistant for top executives of one of the largest Hotel and Hospitality companies in the world.
When she got home and on the weekends she almost always would drink herself into an unconscious stupor.
I loved my mother and she truly loved her kids - when she was sober. Sober she was wise and sweet, when she was drunk she was nasty, belligerent and hyper dramatic drama queen boozily terrorizing her children with tales of her impending death, getting in fender bender hit and runs, and squirreling away Jack Daniels all over the house etc etc and etc.
It poisoned my childhood as I had to deal with a lot of this as the (on site) eldest and my father was away in Africa with the Foreign Service for months and years at a time. Between 10-15 I was the defacto adult in the house. My mother died of a stroke 10 years ago and to this day I still haven’t exorcised all my anger and it frustrates me that I have to deal with this good mom/bad mom dichotomy in resolving my feelings about her.
So to answer your OP drunks who people have to rely on are like walking neutron bombs of dysfunction whose rippling waves of destruction poison the world for the people around them, and that’s “what’s wrong with being an alcoholic?”
From the other perspective too, I think it’s possible that someone could be addicted to thrillseeking or dangerous hobbies, so that those injuries and any repercussions on the people around them would be going too far as well. There might be an element of personal responsibility for an accident that stems from that kind of compulsive behavior too.
I think Lemur866 pretty much had it. If you have absolutely no negative effect on anyone else, I guess there’s nothing wrong with quietly. slowly poisoning yourself to death.
I’ve known hundreds of alchoholics, and there’s maybe two of them that might fit that definition. One was a wealthy recluse.
BTW, why are blackouts so controvesial? All I know, if I told someone that I threw up blood after I drank, I bet most people here would have no problem telling me that maybe I shouldn’t be drinking. But a blackout? No big deal.
Yes and there is also Jack London who was an excellent writer for years but who couldn’t write anything worth publishing the last few years of his life (See Cup Of Fury by Upton Sinclair). London committed suicide when he finally couldn’t take it any more.
Churchill wasn’t all that great late in life. His second go around as PM wasn’t successful at all.
Spencer Tracy is a pretty good example of the selfish drunk. He lived openly with Katherine Hepburn for years but wouldn’t divorce his wife. So he kept her an ignored captive while he did whatever he wanted.
Here’s the thing. It’s actually a lot of fun to go out drinking with a bunch of your friends. That’s the point of drinking. The problem with all these AA MadMom D.A.R.E. Reefer Madness bullshit programs they show you in school is that they all portray drinking like there some small group of bad kids who conspire to entice the unwary through massive peer pressure into a downward spiral of self destruction.
My experience in college was that no one cared if you drank or not. But every weekend that’s what everyone’s doing. If you aren’t part of that scene, you are kind of missing out on a big part of college life. The peer pressure is in the form of “wow…everyone looks like they’re having fun.” Of course some kids can’t handle it and end up flunking out or getting into trouble.
That pattern of social drinking tends to continue after graduation. If you live in a city like New York, that’s what we do. We drink. A lot.
So in other words, this idea that 90% of heavy drinkers are on some self destructive path to the gutter is nonsense. Most people who drink will not go to jail, smash their car, rape some dude, or die falling off a fraternity house balcony.
What controversy? Who argues that they are no big deal?
There’s a difference between “drunken haze” where you kind of vaguely remember the evening through your distorted lense and a “blackout” where you may have been functioning normally for hours and have zero recollection of it. Personally I find the blackouts pretty scary because as far as I know, I could have stabbed a dude in the face and would have no idea. Thus, I try limit my intake so as to avoid getting blackouts (or sick and hungover for that matter as I don’t like that feeling either).
Because being an alcoholic sucks.
According to a professor of mine, black outs are a form of brain damage. Not severe enough in and of themselves, but if you’re so plastered you’re blacking out and forgetting significant amounts of time, you’re probably drinking far too much.
I’ll try and see if I can’t find some sites. Perhaps someone with a medical background (hint hint) can help me out here?
I don’t really think it is - both involve doing things selfishly, without regard for other people. The primary difference is that it’s easier to kick a drunk out of the house.
Case in point - I have two girlfriends.
One married her sweetheart and they had a baby. While they were dating they both partied like CRAZY. Every night, drinking and drugging until they blacked out. They got married, had baby. She sobered up to take care of business, he didn’t bother. She booted him out and everyone cheered her on.
Girlfriend #2 married her sweetheart and had two babies. While they were dating they both did hard-core sports - mountain biking, ice climbing, mountaineering, etc, etc. They got married, had a couple of babies. She now stays home and takes care of the babies. And guess what - he goes out, every weekend, and most weeknights mountain biking, or mountaineering, or learning about snow rescue, etc. I bet if she tried to kick him out she would get very little support (well, she’d get my support, but we had a bit of a falling out about this very guy, and I’m not sure my support means that much).
The fact of the matter is that Guy #1 and Guy #2 are equally selfish assholes, neither of whom make particularly good partners. The difference is that booting out guy #1 is easy, and booting out guy #2 is hard(er).
Sorry, poor choice of words because it implies that there’s some disagreement here in the OP. What I meant to say was that for a lot of drinkers in my experience, alcoholic and otherwise, blackouts are merely considered the price of drinking rather than the big flashing warning light they should be.
Amen, Brother!
You can tell kids all the horror strories you want, but when the ones with the alcoholic gene take that first drink and discover, “This feels fuckin’ great! Mom was full of shit!” , and it’s off to the races. Somehow, we have to convey that, while alcohol makes you feel really, really good in the short run, it can make you feel really, really bad later in life.
That is why it is so seductive; for alcoholics, the immediate pleasure overpowers any thought of consequences that may be years away. Youth alcohol information programs that ignore this or try to cover it up are doomed to failure.