"Rehab: Good short term, bad long term. Rehab failure rate is over %90."That's if you can even get the person into rehab at all! Just before last Christmas we buried a good longtime friend and colleague who'd died of liver cirrhosis. Nothing we did could get him into rehab.
'So what' you may say - he was just one more of many thousands. The trouble was that he was also an organic chemist by training yet even with this insight he couldn't stop his alcohol consumption. It was tragic really.
I've come to the conclusion that those of us who aren't alcoholics have little or no conception of how the mind of an alcoholic works or why he/she finds it necessary to consume alcohol in such damaging quantities. Simply, we cannot get into their minds and perceive the world from their perspective. This is a huge problem as it often stops friends and or family from being effective helpers.
As I see it, there's a perceptual barrier that separates alcoholics from those who aren't alcoholic. It's not a simple matter for a person who is not an alcoholic to put himself/herself into an alcoholic's mindset especially so if the alcoholic has no serious underlying psychological problems (if he/she did have then perhaps the person who's trying to help could envisage the alcoholic's state of mind - that of, say, depression, etc.).
Essentially, even those of us who aren't alcoholics but who've experienced the effects of alcohol can't use that experience (of say, being drunk) as an analog to understand the alcoholic's mindset as both perceptions of the effects of alcohol are fundamentally different.
Take my experience, I recall getting badly drunk in my student days and it was very unpleasant, since then on rare ocassions I've been what you'd call 'merry' from the effects of alcohol. Nevertheless, I find the effect of even a little alcohol both disturbing and mind-dulling and I deliberately avoid getting into that state. On the other hand, the alcoholic either experiences different physical effects from alcohol than I do and or his/her visceral perception of those physical effects of the alcohol are very different to mine.
It seems to me that this difference in percetion between the alcoholic and us who aren't alcoholics is one of the reasons why we're often unsuccessful in helping them. If we cannot communicate on their level then we're at a disadvantage when we try to help them and or offer them support.
That was what I experienced when I tried to help my former friend and colleague. Even though I knew him well and had done so for many years, it was clear to me that when it came to discussing alcohol that we spoke a different language. I'd hasten to add that at no time did I patronize him, nor was I intrusively paternalistic towards him. Essentially there was no effective communication between us on the matter of alcohol.