Just because people may occasionally binge drink, or drink with the intention to get a buzz doesn’t make someone an incipient alcoholic. That’s absurd. That’s not even necessarily a problem for 99.9999% of people who drink.
That seems like a definition written by teetotalers or someone with an axe to grind against alcohol, because it’s ridiculously restrictive and narrow.
It seems to me that you’d need to show a pattern of binge drinking and/or inability to control your drinking before it’s reasonably called “the first stage of alcoholism” or calling someone an “alcohol abuser”. There’s precious little latitude between not having any and being an abuser in that definition.
In other words, there’s a huge difference between someone who might have 3-4 on a weekend night (which counts as binge drinking), and someone who gets completely snot-slinging drunk several times a week on work/school nights.
I wonder sometimes how useful the concept of alcoholism is. It can refer to a broad range of drinking patterns, but it also seems to cover a broad range of underlying causes and ultimate effects. Take the study in this thread, for example: Binge Drinking and Empathy - #3 by LSLGuy
If everyone who has had the equivalent of 2.5 beers in an evening in the last month is a binge drinker, and a binge drinker is an alcoholic, then most people I know are alcoholics at least a couple months out of the year. Yet we’re all holding down jobs, some are raising kids, none are in trouble with the law, none have alcohol-related health problems, and as far as I know we can all reduce or stop our intake as necessary (for example, when taking medication that shouldn’t be combined with alcohol.) So what does it mean to say someone is an alcoholic? Is there a defining feature, a constellation of symptoms that you must have a certain number of?
I tend to think in terms of the negative impact on your life. If you’re doing something you don’t want to do, like throwing up, because of alcohol, but you can’t stop, then maybe you’re an alcoholic-- even if your consumption is lower than someone who has it under control but just likes to drink a lot. But a lot of folks who study these things don’t agree with my definition. So I tend to avoid using the “a” word and instead talk about having a drinking problem. No problems? No drinking problem.
I don’t think that’s what it says. Regardless, it also wasn’t my point. The description in the OP gave me the impression that it was a weekly occurrence. Rereading, maybe that was a wrong impression. But if someone cannot have a drink without proceeding, not just to being drunk, but to the point of vomiting – every single time – then that person seems incapable of controlling their drinking, and I believe that is some degree of alcoholism. (It certainly is a drinking problem.) I am not saying that people who want to get buzzed are alcoholics, not that people who regularly have 2-3, or even 5 drinks are alcoholics, assuming that that does not make them vomit and that it doesn’t happen every week, or every time they drink any alcohol. My point is about the ability to control alcohol consumption to some degree, vs not at all.
Some people are binge drinkers. The first drink flips off one switch, and flips on another. The switch that gets flipped off is the “This isn’t a good idea” switch; the one that gets flipped on is the “I like this stuff, let’s have just a little more” switch - the ‘reward’ mechanism in your brain. For people who overdo it with alcohol, the reward centers get turned on in different ways than with other individuals.
Coming back in to continue drinking isn’t just impaired judgment alone; his brain is seeking a greater enhancement of the ‘high’ or the delirium that he feels when drinking. Even when he is puking or barely able to walk straight, his brain is still telling him “This is a good feeling - let’s have more.” The way the brain feels isn’t necessarily how the body feels. The body is telling him, “Dude, too much, let’s slow down while I get this stuff out of your system!” But the rewards center of the brain, the one that says ‘No worries, no cry, mon’ is saying “More! More!”
I wonder if for some people, they’re not seeking that pleasant 2-3 drink buzz, but rather something more intoxicated. And the problem there, is that your judgment is that much more impaired when you get close to it, and it’s easier to just go right on by into lying curled around the toilet drunk.
If he’s got a “drinking age” son then “uncle” definitely has an alcohol “binge drinking” problem that he’s never grown out of. Looks like he’s AA material.
Back in my 20s when I binge drank all the time, it didn’t take long to learn that keeping on drinking after having drunk lots already results in blackouts, vomiting, injuries etc.
The goal was always, after my first-ever drunken episode at 15, to get that awesome, liberating, world-owning feeling a strong alcohol buzz was to me. About six beers quickly down would get me there.
To sustain the awesome feeling and avoid the somber, semi-depressing coming down, I just had to keep on drinking. At a certain point each time, I would know that if I drink any more, I will eventually vomit, pass out etc., but I just didn’t care - hunting for that buzz was more important. It was a decision.
I stopped binge drinking in my late twenties, when the downsides, especially the hangovers, got worse than the faded reward.
These days I can have a couple of drinks, get a buzz going, and stop right there, as I know and feel things will only get worse if I continued. I very rarely get even mildly embibed, anymore - what little booze I have in my cabinet lasts for years and years.
I guess I had a good chance of becoming an alcoholic, but didn’t.
The whole “initially drink to excess then moderate with age” thing seems to be a fairly common pattern. A lot of people go through that and end up moderate drinkers. Some don’t.
Indeed. My college friends and I used to joke that “it’s not alcoholism until you graduate.” Which I’m sure is a terrible attitude that enables young alcoholics to remain in denial and we should all be ashamed of ourselves. But somehow we all pretty much outgrew that phase before it destroyed us.
Yeah, I think there’s a period when you learn your limits, and also a time for many people where the costs of not moderating are low. Low to nonexistent social judgment, low responsibilities, living on or near campus so no drunk driving, etc. If you really don’t need or want to moderate, it isn’t necessarily clear if you can or not.
Even so, I can look back to those days and think of a couple of people that I would be surprised if they were not alcoholics. They just seemed to have a different relationship to alcohol than the rest of us – to the point that people would sometimes try to get them to moderate, always unsuccessfully.
The bolded part nails it IMHO. If you’ve felt the rush and the crash enough times, you crave the first and will do anything to avoid the second.
OP, you say your uncle only drinks like this at parties, but have you closely observed his drinking at other times? He may be abusing alcohol regularly but isn’t as showy about it without a crowd. In other words, seeing himself as the life of the party may be part of the high of bingeing.
I’ve been at his house on the weekends and stayed there a couple of weeks with my cousin. Never saw him drink more than one or two beers, then go to bed.
If you haven’t grown out of it by the time you’re old enough to do it legally, you have a problem.
It reminds me of people who eat things they know will make them sick: “But it was worth it, because it tasted so good going down!” I’m not talking about something like a person who is on some kind of nausea-inducing meds, or is newly pregnant, and is eating bravely knowing what is likely to happen later.
When I was in school, I worked with a classmate who was definitely an alcoholic.
A college student who comes to class, or work on a weekend morning, hung over is not abnormal. Having multiple hospitalizations for alcoholic gastritis is NOT normal, no way, no how, and I wasn’t surprised when I found out she died about 10 years after we graduated, although I I do not know if it was related to this.
Whenever people chastised me for not drinking (I was in my late 20s when I was in college!), I would just tell them that I didn’t, but it was OK if they did, and it was really none of their business.
In a very acute sense, the reason that people drink to excess while knowing they may puke or have a hangover is because alcohol messes with your thinking, mostly in the realm of reducing inhibitions. That’s the case for occasional “so drunk I puked” situations.
It’s definitely an interesting line to tread, in that when you’re drinking, you have multiple dimensions to consider- what you’re drinking (i.e. how strong it is), how drunk you currently are, how much you’ve had and whether it’s actually in your blood yet, and how full your stomach is with food (it slows absorption).
So depending on how drunk you are, it may seem like a good idea to have one more. But that may backfire if you didn’t correctly judge all those factors above, and leave you more drunk than you intended. Or thinking you can drive home, or fooling around with someone you otherwise wouldn’t, or being belligerent.
And here’s the thing- it’s easy to do with a small handful of drinks, but once you get past a certain point, the alcohol itself messes with your judgment, and if you’re not aware of that, it’s easier than you might think to unintentionally get so wasted that you puke.
Now as for people who set out to get that drunk… all I can figure is that it’s a sort of intentional oblivion in the sense of past a certain point you can’t think straight at all, and maybe if your demons are pushing you that hard, that’s the state you’d rather be in.
There seems to be a huge amount of cultural variation in terms of how alcohol is used. Some of the previous comments suggesting that the uncle must be an alcoholic don’t ring true to me.
Where I live, some people, including responsible adults, enjoy getting very drunk in the company of friends. It may be that family and work obligations and general busyness conspire to ensure that they can almost never do this, but on the one or two occasions in the year (typically around Christmas) when the opportunity arises, they will deliberately and intentionally go out and get very drunk.
This, for me, is not by itself any indication that the person is an alcoholic.