Mental Illness and Alcohol

That's great, coulburt91! How is it going these days?

I have been sober for about 5.5 years at this point. Alcohol was never my "drug of choice" although I abused it more seriously and more consistently than any other substance I was addicted to. I was just a horrible consumer of red wine and vodka. All the time. Morning, night, afternoon, whenever. I seriously took finals drunk. There was nothing I did not do drunk (except drive, I'm sure only because I did not yet have my driver's license.) My delusions about my alcohol abuse were extraordinary.

Anyway, I'm posting here because I have the urge to throw it all away tonight. I don't actually crave a drink, but I'm battling mania, and I know that would make it go away (well, temporarily.) I know it's a terrible idea. I basically just need to confess. Putting it in writing does something special to my brain--it makes it real. I need to hold myself accountable.

I hope it helped, Maehem -- how are you doing now?

We're due an update, colburt

Here's mine: one year clean today.

Congrats, oliveira! That's a huge accomplishment. Ironically, my clean date anniversary was yesterday.
Anyway, I didn't have a drink, so it worked. I should probably make the same confession tonight. And again and again until these feelings pass. I have, for whatever strange reason, incredible impulse control once I actually quit something (except with shopping.) I don't intend to lose that now.

I have autism, PTSD, and depression, I think PTSD and Depression tend to go hand in hand if you ask me.

I was able to beat my alcoholism, I have ideas as to curbing addiction to alcohol, and it's not any 12 step program, rehab facility, or AA.

I joined this forum because I thought I might share some of my thoughts to help some fellow boozehounds, also I was inspired because I found this article on Salon.com, written by a doctor who treated addiction for 30 years at his practice, which really made me understand addiction much more than any rehab I've been to or AA meeting.

http://www.salon.com/2014/03/23/the_pse ... addiction/
^Well worth a read if you're having addiction problems and what to find out about treatments that are a bit newer than AA which was created about 80 years ago.

I've gotten Two DWI's, and I must say my ability to get over alcoholism was a much more effective approach than the rehab programs the states forced onto me. I wrote up a big long thread describing what worked for me, however, I took too long writing it and lost it when the site made me re login.

If any of you have an instant messenger or something along those lines to discuss what worked for me to help me become a person where alcohol is no longer a major problem in my life or having a strong urge every night to drink vast amounts of alcohol, I'm a charitable person and always willing to help out fellow human beings. Send me a PM, I have AIM, Xfire and Skype.

Apologies for the novel-length post!

I have a problem with the article linked here and with Drs Lance and Zachary Dodes, and here’s why.

I do not know whether Lance and Zachary Dodes ever actively took part in AA, NA or any other twelve-step program as members/addicts or is their book based on their second-hand medical experience only. I do know one thing though: 12-step groups are for free. They have nothing to sell except for books which come at cost (my twelve-step book cost me 6.50 euro, “The Sober Truth” costs $19.86 from Amazon) and you don’t HAVE to buy any of them to work the program. So the Dodeses do have a financial incentive to prove something. This already makes me somewhat doubtful.

There’s a lot of inverted commas in the article. For instance, the sentence ‘The legions of “anonymous” members’. In fact, that anonymity is a very important part of why those programs have a big chance of working. It is being taken very seriously by most people who participate. We don’t place inverted commas in this sentence. Which means that the studies Drs Dodes talk about can’t possibly not be skewed: how exactly does one pick people to be interviewed for those studies? Walk into meetings and announce an anonymous study? There’s the sentence “Peer-reviewed studies peg the success rate of AA somewhere between 5 and 10 percent. That is, about one of every fifteen people who enter these programs is able to become and stay sober.” What does “stay sober” mean in this aspect? When is one declared “stayed sober”? If an actual peer-reviewed study took place, it would have to last at least 50 years to be valid. But there’s also a question: what constitutes failure? If a person drank every day for 20 years, then went into AA, stayed sober for 6 months and then had one beer, does this mean AA failed? What if someone stayed sober for 6 months and then had two beers? Ten? Died of alcohol poisoning?

[…] The program doesn’t fail; you fail.
Imagine if similar claims were made in defense of an ineffective antibiotic. Imagine dismissing millions of people who did not respond to a new form of chemotherapy as “constitutionally incapable” of properly receiving the drug.

Yet again, Drs Dodes miss out the crucial fact that AA is FREE. There have been no zillions of dollars from taxpayers’ pockets invested into research. Imagine your medical insurance is free, costs you zilch, nada, zero. Can you even begin to imagine a world like this? One where Big Pharma works entirely for free, with the sole goal of actually curing our illnesses using free medication they have developed for free? Of course not — it’s not possible. Antibiotics must be tested; we don’t understand a lot of those substances; they come with terrible side effects; animals and people become subjects for testing so that at the end FDA can approve the new, super-expensive medication, which then STILL often fails or proves to have unexpected side effects a few years or decades later. Comparing a free program devised by a group of people who discovered what worked for them and shared it with the world with an antibiotic or chemotherapy is comparing a free water fountain in the park with a Michelin restaurant running out of wine.

The program says: "If you want what we have to offer, and are willing to make the effort, then you are ready to take certain Steps. These are the principles that made OUR recovery possible." In other words: "Hey; this worked for us. Try it out!" There is no part of 12 steps that says "This is the ONLY way that works".

Step 1: “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol, that our lives had become unmanageable.”

This step sounds appealing to some and grates heavily on others. The notion of declaring powerlessness is intended to evoke a sense of surrender that might give way to spiritual rebirth. Compelling as this is as a narrative device, it lacks any clinical merit or scientific backing.

Unfortunately Drs Dodes still operate on the flawed set of assumptions. 12 Steps are a spiritual program of recovery. They are not an ineffective antibiotic. Bill W didn’t wake up and announce “I just discovered that swallowing chalk is a cure for cancer, but it must be special type of chalk you will buy from my webstore for $299.99 per gram”. Step 1 is what an addict calls reaching rock bottom, and it is nothing else than an admission that rock bottom has been reached and we honestly do not know what to do now, because all our attempts have failed. How to provide “clinical merit or scientific backing” to our feelings?

While we are powerless over alcohol Step 1 says NOTHING about being powerless over our sobriety/recovery! In fact -- all 12-Step programs are very clear in our power over recovery: it's there for us to use if we dare do what we need to do to get it.

Many scholars have written about the close bond between AA and religion. This is perhaps inevitable: AA was founded as a religious organization whose design and practices hewed closely to its spiritual forerunner, the Oxford Group, whose members believed strongly in the purging of sinfulness through conversion experiences. As Bill Wilson wrote in the Big Book: “To some people we need not, and probably should not, emphasize the spiritual feature on our first approach. We might prejudice them. At the moment we are trying to put our lives in order. But this is not an end in itself. Our real purpose is to fit ourselves to be of maximum service to God.”

Drs Dodes conveniently omit the fact that there was more than one founder of AA. Wilsons separated from Oxford Group in 1937, before the Big Book was even published. Jim Burwell, an atheist, ensured that from the earliest days the 12 Steps would lose their emphasis on Catholic God and instead move over to “God as we understood Him” and “Higher Power”.

Also, I suggest the Drs google "atheistic alcoholics anonymous", they're up for a surprise.

Step 3: “Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood God.”

For an organization that has expressly denied religious standing and publicly claims a secular—even scientific—approach, it is curious that AA retains these explicit references to a spiritual power whose care might help light the way toward recovery. Even for addicts who opt to interpret this step secularly, the problem persists: why can’t this ultimate power lie within the addict?

Because if the addict could recover without the help of something greater than him or her — be it God, gods, Mother Nature, The X Factor, the group — surely they wouldn’t need a program for that? We’d all just go “oh, to hell with addiction, I decided I’m free of it now” and become “recovered”.

Step 4: “Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.”

The notion that people with addictions suffer from a failure of morality to be indexed and removed is fundamental to Alcoholics Anonymous. Yet addiction is not a moral defect, and to suggest that does a great disservice to people suffering with this disorder.

It is this bit that makes me think Drs Dodes have never attempted to actually go to meetings or even read the literature, because they somehow got an idea that “moral inventory” means “index of failures of morality”. Moral inventory is what it says it is: inventory. Of everything. Of sides good and bad. Addicts I met in NA are often good, bad, nice, not so nice, sweet, irritated, helpful, grumpy, proud, humble, arrogant, loud, quiet… We don’t all sit around a table murmuring helplessly “I iz so evil, oh Lord please kill me with a thunder for I iz unworthy”. The inventory helps us find out what doesn't work... but also what does. Because we want to keep that.

[Steps 5-7] These steps rehash the problems of their predecessors: the religiosity, the admission of moral defectiveness, the embrace of powerlessness, and the search for a cure through divine purification. The degradation woven through these steps also seems unwittingly designed to exacerbate, rather than relieve, the humiliating feelings so common in addiction.

Again, that’s only true if you haven’t actually tried the program. I’ve been doing step work for a year now, and yes, I have discovered quite a lot of defects of my character. But what in a depressive period fuelled by alcohol and drugs would give me a reason to whip myself with thoughts about what a piece of scum I was, is now a liberating and exhilarating feeling, because I realise that 1) often I was actually doing better than I thought; 2) I am not guilty of every bad thing in the world ever; 3) there are others with same problems as mine (or worse); 4) that knowing the mistakes I have made means I don’t have to make them again.

If moral self-flagellation could cure addiction, we could be sure there would be precious few addicts.

Oooh aaarrrr, the shade! Doctors sure get a bit emotional here. Isn’t it strange though how I was hitting my rock-bottom when I was busy with the self-flagellation, but now that I am following this terrible program that totally doesn’t work and humiliates me all of the time I actually feel really good about myself and stay clean. 8-o

Step 8: “Made a list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all.”

Step 9: “Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.”

There is nothing inherently wrong with apologizing to those who have been harmed, directly or indirectly, by the consequences of addiction. The problem is the echo once more of the fundamentalist religious principle: that the path to recovery is to cleanse oneself of sin.

This is a massive error that Drs are making here: that the point of steps 8 and 9 is to “cleanse ourselves of sin”. No. The point of steps 8 and 9 is to forgive ourselves. We do not go to a priest to confess anything. We go to the person we have harmed and ask them to forgive us. But: the priest is obliged to forgive us our sins, perhaps dealing some sort of “punishment” like 50 Hail Marys. The person in step 9 isn’t obliged to do anything at all. They can throw objects at us, or refuse to pick up the phone, or give us a hug. It doesn’t matter what they do. What matters is that we did our best to repair the damage, and we are the judges of whether we did our best. Once we did what we could, we can move on. This doesn't have to hurt ever again. And we don't have to repeat this behaviour ever again.

Step 10: “Continued to take personal inventory, and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.”

People suffering with addictions as a rule tend to be well aware of the many “wrongs” they have committed. Awareness of this fact doesn’t help the problem.

At this point I am starting to wonder if Drs are actually qualified to perform their jobs if they do not understand the power of denial.

The reason we continue to take personal inventory is so we can identify repeated patterns of unwanted (by us!) behaviour -- but also good stuff that we do. It's not a religious program of self-flagellation, it's a spiritual program of self-improvement.

Step 11: “Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood God, praying only for knowledge of God’s will for us and the power to carry that out.”

If AA were simply presented as a religious movement dedicated to trying to comfort addicts through faith and prayer, the program would not be so problematic. What is troubling is how resolutely—and some might say disingenuously—AA has taken pains to dissociate itself from the faith-based methodology it encourages.

I happen to be religious. I happen not to be Catholic, Muslim, Jewish, Scientologic or whatever else features in this week’s top 10 religions. But my group has people in it who picked nature or music as their Higher Power. I don’t think those people fall to their knees to ask nature “Mom Nats, have I done wrong today” (although of course I don’t KNOW). But doctors Dodes spend so much time proving their theory and overlooking any hints that they might not be correct that of course evidence to the contrary can’t possibly interest them. Tunnel vision, drs Dodes? I'm sure there's medication for that.

Step 12: “Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to other addicts and to practice these principles in all our affairs.”

AA’s emphasis on proselytizing, a basic tool through which recognized religions and certain fringe religious groups spread their message, is an essential part of its worldwide success, and it’s a big reason that it has been nearly impossible to have an open national dialogue about other, potentially better ways to treat addiction.

Dr and Dr, you wrote a book, you give interviews and publish articles. How is this not “proselytising” and “spreading your message”?

I have been treating people suffering with addictions in public and private hospitals, in clinics, and in my private practice for more than thirty years. In that time, I have met and listened to a very large number of people who have “failed” at AA and some who continue to swear by it, despite repeated recidivism.

Yet you haven’t met the people who haven’t relapsed AND who remain sober… I wonder if it might JUST be because they don’t need to visit a Dr Dodes? (This reminds me strongly of Paul Cameron’s “research” “proving” that all gay men were infected with HIV and likely to die before reaching 40… because Cameron picked his statistical sample from patients of HIV/AIDS clinics).

Advisors there recommended that Dominic begin attending AA, which he did. He became fond of his sponsor and felt included for the first time in years—no small feat for a suffering young man. But he also found himself increasingly resentful of the “tally system” that AA uses to measure sobriety: every time he “slipped” and had a drink, he “went back to zero.” All the chips he’d earned—the tokens given by AA for milestone periods of sobriety—became meaningless. This system compounded his sense of shame and anger, leading him to wonder why he lacked the willpower or fortitude to master the incredible force of his alcoholism.[ /quote]
Accidental evidence aside — tsk, Drs — this isn’t entirely how I personally see it. I have now been clean and sober for over a year and counting. If tomorrow somehow I “slip” and have a drink, yes, my clean date will be reset, but it will not cancel the fact I managed a year. Yes, I would feel ashamed of having to go to the meeting and admit I had a relapse, but I wouldn’t feel like my chips became meaningless. I wouldn’t have to give them back either. I’d use them as a reminder of what I am capable of.

When Dominic entered my office, he had accepted as empirical truth that he was a deeply flawed individual: amoral, narcissistic, and unable to turn himself over to a Higher Power. How else to explain the swath of destruction he had cut through his own life and the lives of those who loved him? His time in AA had also taught him that his deeper psychological life was immaterial to mastering his addiction.

Poor Dominic obviously never reached step 4, in which I currently am learning things about my deeper psychological life that I never learned in my two years of psychotherapy. (And I don’t pay for it, unless you include the fact that my sponsor eats dinner with me.) By the way, if anyone in AA told Dominic he was “amoral” and “narcissistic”, that person truly needs to get a big kick in the ass from their sponsor.

I could go on, but truth is, I don’t need to. I don’t feel the need to convince anyone, including Jimmy above. I just don’t think that two people peddling a book should remain the last thing posted in a rather serious thread about mental illness and alcohol combined.

12 Steps used to confuse me for a long time, largely because the word "God" was used and I thought people like Drs Dodes were correctly pointing out the Christian connotations. I'm glad I spent some time researching the program and practising it. Perhaps the good doctors should too. I'm available for lunch dates. I'll wear sunglasses though, to protect my anonymity.