People who “drink to cope” can make their symptoms worse: study

#1

Post by ChrisHardman29 » Sat, Oct 23, 2021, 3:31 PM UTC

People who “drink to cope” can make their symptoms worse: study
digest.bps.org.uk

Re: People who “drink to cope” can make their symptoms worse: study

#2

Post by coldtea » Sat, Oct 23, 2021, 4:12 PM UTC

Speak for yourself.

Especially if your research setup is as good as useless ("The team concedes various limitations to the study, mostly to do with factors affecting generalisability. The over-representation of women among the participants (as well as the fact that a large proportion were diagnosed with BPD) certainly means that the results are not necessarily applicable to the general population"), not to mention the methodology is self reporting questionaires.

Re: People who “drink to cope” can make their symptoms worse: study

#3

Post by arbitrage » Sat, Oct 23, 2021, 4:13 PM UTC

> The study involved 110 participants; 58 were from the general community and 52 had a diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder.

Be wary with this headline ... this study does NOT reflect the general population, at all.

Re: People who “drink to cope” can make their symptoms worse: study

#4

Post by consp » Sat, Oct 23, 2021, 4:16 PM UTC

arbitrage wrote: post #3

> The study involved 110 participants; 58 were from the general community and 52 had a diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder. Be wary with this headline ... this study does NOT reflect the general population, at all.

They should definitely lead with this instead of the actual title. But is doesn't sound as interesting of course.

Re: People who “drink to cope” can make their symptoms worse: study

#5

Post by dang » Sat, Oct 23, 2021, 4:17 PM UTC

arbitrage wrote: post #3

> The study involved 110 participants; 58 were from the general community and 52 had a diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder. Be wary with this headline ... this study does NOT reflect the general population, at all.

We've replaced the headline with a more modest sentence from the article body and added the ": study" qualifier, which is always a good idea.

Re: People who “drink to cope” can make their symptoms worse: study

#6

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Oct 23, 2021, 4:18 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: People who “drink to cope” can make their symptoms worse: study

#7

Post by iamthepieman » Sat, Oct 23, 2021, 4:19 PM UTC

Part of drinking to cope is dulling the internal self critical monologue. For someone who drinks to cope this includes blocking out the very thought that they ARE drinking to cope. If you are then asked to explicitly think about the choice to drink and how that makes you feel then I would expect exactly the results that the researchers in this study got.

    "Whenever a participant reported having had an alcoholic drink....At various points over the following three hours, they then rated the extent to which they felt the drink had “relieved unpleasant feelings or symptoms”, and also provided updated ratings of their levels of those various negative feelings."

I'd be interested in a study which analyzed participants focus on negative thoughts without explicitly asking them to be self aware about them.

I also wonder if this is applicable to procrastination and self deceptive actions in general. If I'm reading some "candy" novel when I should be sleeping but know that I've got to check in 15 minutes from now about how I feel about bedtime procrastination then I'm not going to enjoy the book. The whole point is to immerse myself in something that distracts me from my depression, anxiety and shame at the very process of distraction.

Re: People who “drink to cope” can make their symptoms worse: study

#8

Post by whilestanding » Sat, Oct 23, 2021, 4:21 PM UTC

I've been able to quit all the substances I used to cope; cigarettes, marijuana, alcohol, after a rather depressing realization that in fact none of them made me feel better in the long run. Short term gains at the cost of long term financial physical and mental health. The model I use to think of it is that drugs steal life energy from your future and give it to you in the present. That's the devil's deal you're given.

Re: People who “drink to cope” can make their symptoms worse: study

#9

Post by 34tlkjlk » Sat, Oct 23, 2021, 4:22 PM UTC

Really disgusted with the level of hard-left propaganda being pushed onto HN nowadays.

HN has always tilted left but ever since covid happened it has turned into a megaphone of junk science, and radical left talking points.

Can we please please please keep HN only for tech/startups? Can we turn back the clock?

Re: People who “drink to cope” can make their symptoms worse: study

#10

Post by _8j50 » Sat, Oct 23, 2021, 4:25 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #2

Speak for yourself. Especially if your research setup is as good as useless ("The team concedes various limitations to the study, mostly to do with factors affecting generalisability. The over-representation of women among the participants (as well as the fact that a large proportion were diagnosed with BPD) certainly means that the results are not necessarily applicable to the general population"), not to mention th…

My only beef with drinking is it makes you so fat so fast! I wish I knew it was worse than eating bars of butter and buckets of cooking oil.

It doesn't solve problems but stops the pain. Frees you temporarily from thinking and deciding things under the influence of pain.

I don't get modern medicine. Grief, loss, loneliness (long term), stress and more mental/emotional ailments are found to be detrimental to human health, even causing most non-cancer chronic diseases. I would really like to see a study that somehow shows people surviving long term who were about so self-medicate with tobacco or alcohol, instead of survival rate that only takes into account the substance's harm.

Alcohol and cigarettes harmed me but they also helped me survive. It's not a black and white clear cut thing.