I recently had a brush with my own alcoholism, this is my story. Do you think alcoholism is a disease or just a lack of will power?
A brief experience of alcoholism.
Recently I may have experienced to a small degree what an alcoholic (or any form of addiction) feels when they start to come down from a high after an extended period of alcohol consumption.
I am regular drinker but not an excessive one, on average I go out for drinks 2-3 times a week and very rarely drink at home. However i recently had some visitors and possible business associates in town for 8 days for a conference (the conference was only 1 day). For most it was their first trip here and they wanted to terrorise the local night life. Not to go on too much about their trip, we drank everyday, all day non stop most nights finishing about 4 or 5 in the morning. On one 2 day stretch we easily finished 5 slabs of beer (24 cans per slab) and 3 bottles of vodka between 5 guys!
By the last 2 or 3 days i found that the usual effects of excessive drinking became harder to achieve. It would seem that it required more and more alcohol to get drunk. For those of you who drink on a regular basis and consider yourselves being able to hold your drink very well will probably be saying, “No shit sherlock!”. The funny thing is that the day after they all left i felt quite ok for the most part of day, but by about 4 something in the afternoon i started to feel edgy and i could feel the onset of depression. I had no reason to feel depressed as the last week was pretty good and in terms of business opportunities it seemed that things would work in my favour. I thought about this for a while and decided to try an experiment. I decided to go to my regular watering hole and see how I would feel after a few drinks.
Previously, if I had had a heavy night out on the piss the next day I would feel like a monkey had crapped in my skull and there would be no way you'd get me out the next night because not only would I be too tired I wouldn't be able to stomach even the smell of alcohol. This time I had no such problem. To cut a long story short, after only two drinks I felt myself start to normalise. NOT GOOD!!!!! I guess that this is why an alcoholic keeps on drinking.
This brings me now to my main point, the debate over whether or not alcoholism is a disease. Medically it is classed as one but many people can't agree on this. I'm not going to take a position on whether it is or not but i do want to create a point of contention about it.
Psychologists and other medical professionals all say that if a person has an addictive personality or if a person has at least 1 parent who is an alcoholic, that person has a much higher possibility of becoming one themselves. I have 2 questions here about these 2 supposed causes alcoholism. First, what exactly is an addictive personality and 2nd, on what basis does a person inherit the “Disease” of alcoholism?
What is an addictive personality? Do we all not have the potential to have an addictive personality? Every person if given the opportunity can find at least one thing, hobby or vice that they enjoy more than anything else and will take every chance they can to indulge in it. An oxymoron to this is that I even know people that seem to crave or thrive on feeling miserable! Some are addicted to sex, work or just about any other socially acceptable activity.
For arguments sake, lets compare an alcoholic to a formula 1 driver or a practitioner of some extreme activity such as base jumpers or other adrenalin junkies. Is not a formula 1 driver someone who could be considered addicted to driving at extremely fast speeds? Is not a base jumper someone who could be considered addicted to the rush of adrenalin that that activity provides? I can't quote actual figures but it stands to reason (and history has proven it) that both an F1 driver and a base jumper stand a pretty good chance of becoming victims of they're respective passion/addiction just as does an alcoholic. The risks of serious injury or death is pretty high for either an extreme sports athlete or an alcoholic. I'm NOT advocating alcoholism but merely questioning the statement of “Addictive Personalty”. I've yet to hear of anybody trying to cure the disease of being an F1 driver or base jumper. Are there any Race Driver Anonymous support groups out there to address this issue?
I just don't understand this “Addictive Personalty” thing as a contributing cause to alcoholism, based on this we all stand the risk of being alcoholics. “Addictive Personalty” is just another part of the human condition.
The second possible cause of alcoholism I want to question is the idea that if you have at least one parent who is/was an alcoholic, you stand a much higher chance of become one yourself. I can't dispute the fact that this statement has hard data from numerous studies that prove the correlation between alcoholics and they're alcoholic parents but can somebody answer the following questions;
1).Do alcoholics who inherit this trait from their parents get it via genetic information at conception such as a family history of heart disease or diabetes?
2).Or is it received as a personality trait?
3).Or is it simply cause and effect that just because a child is exposed to alcoholism that they are at greater risk of succumbing to it?
Point number 3 is the one that bothers me. If alcoholism is to be classed as a disease, what about those children of an alcoholic parent/s who mature into well adjusted adults? Did they simply somehow manage to avoid contracting or developing that dreaded family history of the alcoholic disease? Or did these people just make a conscious decision not to succumb to the same depths of dispare as their parent/s? There are many instances whereby children are exposed to or grow up around undesirable elements or situations such as poverty, abuse, sexual abuse or parental abandonment but manage to mature into well adjusted adults. We often hear uplifting stories of people who rise up against all odds to do fantastic things and become people to admire or look up to.
To simplify it but hopefully not to diminish to value of their achievements, didn't these people just look at their own situation and say, “Hey, I'm not going to be like that. I'm going to be different, I'm going to do things right and make my situation better”? I'm sure it wasn't easy. I'm sure it was damn difficult but that's why we hear and love these stories and make movies out of them. These people made a conscious decision not to be like their parents and didn't use the excuse that their parent were such so I'll blame them for me being such.
Back to my own brush with alcoholism, even though the alcohol was starting to make me feel better, about half way through my 3rd drink I start to become very aware that I had a liver and kidneys (started to feel uncomfortable around that area). I stopped drinking. But don't worry Mr. Jack Daniels I'll be back next week. I'll just make the conscious decision not to drink so much.
