I am a professional mother of two who grew up associating alcohol with fun. In my early twenties, it's what marked me out as the archetypal party girl, in my early professional life big nights out were par for the course.

After the birth of my first child, wine lifted me from the humdrum and provided a reliable link to the old me, the one unfettered by responsibility. With a drink inside me, I felt flirtatious, free, glamorous and eternally young.

I never drank during the day - I was holding down a full time job - but I now know that I was definitely displaying alcohol-dependent characteristics. Which is why it came to me as no surprise to me to discover this week that educated British women now head a global league table for alcohol abuse.

For anyone with a preconceived notion that the problem lies with the raucous 'girls' night out' brigade, the ones with a taste for alcopops and vodka shots, think again.

• Numbers of young women dying due to alcohol increasing

As the study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development suggests it's professional women - lawyers, teachers and those working in the finance sector - who are statistically more prone to consuming hazardous amounts of alcohol on a regular basis.

Many may begin heavy drinking when they are young, but it is a habit which continues into middle age, with many women downing hazardous quantities of alcohol at home and often alone.

t is something I can relate too and a problem that I only admitted to having when I woke up in A&E under the stark lighting and disapproving glare of the duty nurse.

By then I had been consuming up to two bottles of wine a night and had blacked out during one of my increasingly regular binges. It was April 2011 and I haven't touched a drop since. Continue reading

• Lucy Rocca in The Telegraph

Lucy Rocca is founder of a website, Soberistas.com. Lucy gave up drinking alcohol and discovered how much better life is without it.

Forgive me for leading with a rather painful and obvious pun, but I have a confession to make: I am a member of Alcoholics Anonymous who is also a practicing Catholic.

I was born this way.

My godparents, Francis and Frances, as it happened, renounced Satan for me, and all his empty promises, when I was an infant.

My mother taught me to say the Lord's Prayer and the Hail Mary when I was three or four years old, and explained to me, in her way, the concept of the Holy Trinity.

It remains as mysterious to me now as it was then.

I attended a Catholic school.

The sacraments of Confession (now better known, perhaps more poignantly, as Reconciliation), First Holy Communion, and Confirmation were incorporated into my education.

Those roots took deep hold. But shortly after I graduated, I "got on" with my life.

Outside the odd wedding or funeral where my presence was required, a guilt-panged Easter or two, I was away from the church for the decades that dovetailed with my drinking and drugging.

I remember firing up a big joint before Midnight Mass one Christmas, and the utter horror of the "high."

I almost fainted out of paranoia and anxiety.

I survived the decades I wasted on alcoholism and landed in AA, and without being too thin-skinned about it, I noticed a decided anti-Catholic bent at the meetings I was attending.

That sentiment has persisted.

Some pithy member will uncork a comment along the lines of, "In addition to being an alcoholic, I'm also a recovering Catholic" or kick off their story with, "I'm from an Irish Catholic family. I could end the qualification right there" to scattered titters of approval.

All in good fun.

No more harm in a lively Catholic bash than in telling a joke that ends in an anti-Semitic punch line, right? Continue reading

Source

• Harry Healy in The Fix

Harry Healy is a regular contributor to The Fix.

AA is arguably one of the only treatments effective for alcoholics wishing to become sober. And few, if any, support groups or organisations can claim the widespread acceptance and awareness of Alcoholics Anonymous. But AA's approach to curing addiction is not medical at all.

Why is it that an organisation founded on the idea of a spiritual awakening has been able to cement itself firmly in the history of addiction research and treatment? Has this been a help or a hindrance to understanding the condition?

In the nineteenth century, physicians considered all forms of addiction to be a sign of akrasia, or weakness of will. This developed into a view that addiction is a consequence of an individual's psychological development interacting with their social environment.

Alcoholics Anonymous was founded by Bill Wilson and Dr Bob Smith in 1935. It was largely after 1956, when the American Medical Association recognised alcoholics as legitimate patients requiring medical care, that the idea that alcoholism was a disease took hold. But physicians were not able to come up with a medical cure that worked.

The now familiar concept that the cause of addiction is to be found in the brain appeared after this. Advancements in technology allowed researchers to pinpoint some of the pathways of addiction.

In 1979 Avram Goldstein argued that heroin and all narcotics work on our brain's reward system. These drugs hijack the regular pathways of dopamine, wreaking havoc on the brain's ability to regulate it and endorphins. This havoc, he argued, leads to addiction.

This "brain-based" model of addiction directed research until the 1980s and 1990s, when Dr Stanton Peele and Dr Bruce Alexander independently began to question the isolation of addiction research from cultural contexts.

Both Peele and Alexander wrote that addiction is more than just the effect of a drug on the brain. The context in which an individual engages in drug taking is equally important as the drug itself. Alexander went as far as to argue that the idea of drug-induced addiction was a myth. Continue reading

Sources

• The Conversation
• Image: Wired