24February2010
Problem Drinker
Among his several contributions to our data of alcoholism is that the exceptional list of signs and symptoms of what constitutes a “drawback drinker,” a phrase coined by Dr. Durfee and that he uses as opposed to alcoholic. Some critics of Dr. Durfee aver that “drawback drinker” could be a Victorianesque euphemism for an economic elite that cannot stomach the tough truth of “alcoholic.” This can be not the case. Dr. Durfee explains that ” ‘chronic alcoholic,’ in law, in criminology, and in sociology, has assumed a sturdy suggestion of ethical stigma.” There’s little doubt of it. With Alcoholics Anonymous, we have a tendency to believe that no stigma ought to be hooked up to the term. Every effort ought to be made to point out the patent absurdity and ignorance of such a stigma in managing a disease. For just because the diabetic cannot live while not insulin, therefore the alcoholic cannot live with alcohol.
Dr. Durfee’s reasons for coining the term, drawback drinker, instead of bucking the current, were motivated by therapeutic experience. He found in treatment of “alcoholics” that this suggestion of “weakness and ethical unfitness might do serious psychological hurt to patient and therapist alike in discussing the problems posed by alcohol.” Dr. Durfee defines the problem drinker as “an individual in whose life drink overshadows, threatens, or has already destroyed what we have a tendency to consider normal living.”
The primary of Dr. Durfee’s eight signs and symptoms is “to draw a blank”—that not uncommon expertise in that, when a bound range of drinks, the drinker is intoxicated but maintains consciousness, apparently aware of what he’s saying and doing, solely to recollect nothing whatever of what he has said or done the next day. This incidence could be a definite sign of physiological changes taking place at intervals the drinker. Dr. Durfee calls the second sign “additional-curricular drinks.”
This takes several forms, like “pantry drinking” at parties; feeling the necessity for “a quick one” before the party or the meeting; or feeling that the drinks are too weak or served with too nice an interval between them. These are all indications of the “incipient drawback drinker.”The third sign is “an unwillingness to talk concerning liquor as a drawback in his life,” and “a readiness to accuse friends and family of imagined slights and wrongs.” The fourth is “rationalization.” In the start this takes the shape of finding all types of excuses for taking a drink. “When rationalization is carried over from justifying a few drinks to justifying a succession of drinks, with no contemplateready amount of abstinence, then the familiar mental pattern of the problem drinker has taken shape.” “Unwillingness to attend conferences, dinners, and social functions where liquor is not served,” the fifth sign, indicates “that alcohol has lost its true relative value to its victim.” At this stage “the prospect of a drink is more pleasing than any alternative aspect of a party, a conference, on a daily basis or an hour of relaxation.”