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How to Identify an Alcoholic

Spotting an alcoholic is an effortless task. They pour Jim Beam on their cornflakes for breakfast, sip cider on park benches until 11am then potter about in the pub till closing. They awake in a shivering midnight delirium, groping for the brandy to banish the hideous visions of the frolicking pink elephant on the ceiling. Alcoholics keep whiskey bottles in brown paper bags in their office drawer at work and carry hipflasks in the inside of their soiled sports jackets. Alcoholics live off raw potatoes and soup but their most conspicuous peculiarity is their Rudolphish red nose, lighting the way to the pub for last orders. Spotting an alcoholic is as equal in facileness to spotting a stripy-shirted, beret-wearing, garlic-carrying cyclist in Paris.

This grotesque image of the alcohol dependant is as far removed from reality as the notion that the initial signs of alcoholism are overt and easily perceived. The varying states of alcohol abuse are broad; some drink heavily and obsessively every day, revolving their whole existence around the bottle; others confine their drinking, exploding a week of abstinence into a weekend of excess where recommended weekly limits are doubled or tripled in a single session. Health experts suggest that we should restrict our weekly intake to no more than 21 units for men and 14 for women – one pint of beer being equivalent to about 2.5 units. Anyone heavily surpassing these boundaries, either daily, or by hoarding ‘unused’ limits for a Friday night blow-out, is thus exposing himself to the risk of alcohol-induced illness.

But at what stage does drink become the life-haemorrhaging addiction that requires serious attention and treatment? Statistics suggest that as many as one-in-seventeen men and one-in-fifty women have fallen so deep into the booze-pool that they require assistance in swimming, then staying, out. Without treatment they face a gruesome medley of illnesses such as cirrhosis or gastritis, which may not manifest itself until the blood starts appearing in the vomit. And then there is the risk of mental ailments like chronic anxiety and depression. The gradual physical and mental demise of the untreated alcoholic usually unravels in a life-sapping world of financial hardship and alienation of friends and family.

If the symptoms of a growing alcohol dependency are detected early then this morbid personal abyss can be avoided. The initial signs are not obvious but with honest self-reflection or a passive ear to the words of a caring, perceptive friend, treatment can be administered before the vice clamps down so hard that escape becomes a death battle. The key is spotting the signs and then accepting the problem. The initial symptoms are subtle; a growing inclination to drinking alone, an increase in quantity and frequency, a strengthening impulse, a disruption to vocational and leisure pursuits, diverting time and income away from normal endeavours. These antecedents can proliferate into the obvious and ugly scenes of total dependence; drinking to soften withdrawal, increased tolerance, loss of personal ambition, neglect of family life and friendship, reduced or paralysed self-control, aggression, illness, death.

Despite the disparity in these two contradictory words, there is no deep chasm standing between the subtle and obvious symptoms of alcoholism. They are fabric of the same suffocating blanket and escape comes from a repertoire of reflection, honesty, treatment and determination.