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Alcohol-related deaths spiked during the pandemic, a study shows

nytimes.com

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Re: Alcohol-related deaths spiked during the pandemic, a study shows

#221

Post by opportune »

tyingq wrote: post #62
ejb999 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>then push you out the door and tell you to find an AA group. What is it exactly you want the hospital to do if your friend won't stop drinking?

Your comment illustrates a large part of the problem. If society believes addiction is mostly a willpower problem, then effective services to help address it won't exist.

I am an alcoholic sober for several years. It is fundamentally a willpower problem. Even if insurance or the government paid for inpatient rehab, as soon as you walk out the door it’s only willpower that stops you from continuing to drink. The same goes for being given medication that reduces cravings for alcohol or makes you sick if you drink. You can always just not take it.

That said, most people don’t become addicts in a vacuum. Many people become addicts only because a life under the influence beats their life otherwise. Unfortunately it’s a lot harder to fix someone’s life than it is to get them sober. But the poor sober life is, in my opinion, the actual underlying condition which leads to addiction. We don’t really have a framework for treating that as a society nor through the medical system.

Re: Alcohol-related deaths spiked during the pandemic, a study shows

#222

Post by bduerst »

kaczordon wrote: post #160
elliekelly wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some reason we, as a society, have decided certain health problems are moral failures to be treated with shame and cured through willpower alone rather than modern medical intervention.

People often turn to drugs when there are other problems in their life they can’t deal with. Drug abuse is not just about the physical hook.

People also turn to drugs because they were irresponsibly prescribed opioids and developed a chemical addiction.

This idea that addiction is something that only happens to people who "just can't deal with life" needs to die.

Re: Alcohol-related deaths spiked during the pandemic, a study shows

#223

Post by kevinventullo »

psychlops wrote: post #130

I notice that "the pandemic" is quickly found as the root cause and no analysis at all is done to identify if the response to the pandemic is to be implicated as well. I'd wager that waking up one day and discovering that one's job is not essential might be stressful. Being forbidden from going to the beaches and parks might have contributed. The stress of learned helplessness from countless bureaucratic decisions la…

Well of course it’s the response. Surely no one thinks that the virus itself causes alcoholism?

I think “the pandemic” here means both the spread of the virus and society’s response to it.

Re: Alcohol-related deaths spiked during the pandemic, a study shows

#224

Post by barbazoo »

ramijames wrote: post #122
bluedino wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why?

Small kids. Non-stop work. No help from parents or the government. In my country if you're a freelancer, you got zero pandemic-related stipends. Has ended in divorce. Traumatized kids. I'm an emotional wreck, but I try to hide it and soldier on. There's only so much people can take before they give up.

I wish you the best and hope things get better for you.

Re: Alcohol-related deaths spiked during the pandemic, a study shows

#225

Post by barbazoo »

adamrezich wrote: post #201

crazy how absolutely nobody saw nth-order effects coming

I'm trying not to armchair quarterback so I'm asking, what would you have done differently? Aren't there obvious priorities here that need to be dealt with and a deep analysis about potential pandemic responses and their n-th order effects would have been even more detrimental?

Re: Alcohol-related deaths spiked during the pandemic, a study shows

#226

Post by undersuit »

nautilius wrote: post #172
emerged wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well you clearly didn’t read the article because the entire thing is talking about all of the sorts of causes you listed.

I think psychlops suggests seeing the pandemic as a catalyst rather than the cause.

So introducing a catalyst to a stable reaction and then not attributing the increased reaction rates to the catalyst...

Re: Alcohol-related deaths spiked during the pandemic, a study shows

#227

Post by yosito »

cutthegrass2 wrote: post #191
dataengineer56 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was my situation too - I wasn't drinking much and decided I'd do some reading to decide whether I should keep drinking intermittently or just ditch it entirely. Once I started reading then I couldn't believe I'd ever drank in the first place.

are you able to share any links to the info you read?

Not the commenter you were replying to, but Biology of Desire by Marc Lewis was a good one. There was also a lot of good info in The Sober Truth by Lance Dodes, but it's more of a rebuttal against 12 step programs.

Re: Alcohol-related deaths spiked during the pandemic, a study shows

#228

Post by elliekelly »

ponow wrote: post #155
elliekelly wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some reason we, as a society, have decided certain health problems are moral failures to be treated with shame and cured through willpower alone rather than modern medical intervention.

"For some reason" there are temptations to addiction all around us, and alcohol is only one. We can't treat being human as merely a medical condition. Human cultures have adapted using shame as a tool.

Yes but to what end? I don’t think shame is nearly as effective a “tool” as you imagine. What are some examples of things that humans have commonly shamed one another for throughout history? Most of them, with the benefit of hindsight, were nonsense and the shame solved nothing. How many gay people were “cured” by the shame they endured? How many people with depression? Or obesity? Or AIDS? Or epilepsy? Or leprosy? Or PTSD? Or diabetes? Or dyslexia?

And that’s to say nothing of the other ridiculous ways shame is wielded: when a man wants to be a stay-at-home dad, when a person doesn’t want to become a parent, when someone emigrates to another country, when someone is in a relationship with a person of another race. All of these people have been “shamed” yet none of these behaviors have abated.

What would you think of a manager who uses shame to “motivate” their employees? Or a teacher who uses shame to "motivate" students? You’d probably think they’re awful at their job. We know that putting people down is a terrible an ineffective way to motivate them to move forward.

So why do we still think it magically works when it comes to addiction? It doesn’t.

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