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U.S. alcohol-related deaths have doubled, study says

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Re: U.S. alcohol-related deaths have doubled, study says

#41

Post by jokowueu »

dranktoomuch wrote: post #20

Hey gang. I've been an HN member for a long time, fairly prominent Bay Area tech executive, rich in the sense of both bank accounts and family. Alcohol brought me to my knees in my late 20s / early 30s. It started out as the typical "social lubricant" to help a natural introvert be better at connecting with people and was wonderful at that - I was the life of the party. Over a decade it leaked into a "requirement" fo…

I know a functional alcoholic that drins a very large amount of alcohol but doesn't get drunk from it. He wants to stop but refuses to go through long PAWs. How long was it until you felt your normal self ?

Re: U.S. alcohol-related deaths have doubled, study says

#42

Post by draw_down »

randlet wrote: post #7

Alcohol is really weird. It's unquestionably a pretty hard drug and yet it's (ab)use is completely normalized in our culture. It's also a drug who's abuse regularly kills people other than those using it.

It's also crazy to me to see people rail on the point of "marijuana is not completely safe!" when we sell this literal poison everywhere. And it's so much more destructive than whatever people think is so scary about marijuana.

Re: U.S. alcohol-related deaths have doubled, study says

#43

Post by WalterSear »

pstuart wrote: post #30
wjossey wrote: post #5

My father died in July of 2015 from alcohol, at the very young age of 60. He drank daily, and then slowly stopped moving due to other health issues related to back pain. After refusing rehab and other options, he eventually died at his home one evening. His drinking buddy was my step-mother, who followed an identical trajectory. Less than four years later, she died in the same spot of the house, in her late 50s. The…

I'm so sorry. I've been there too and that powerlessness is devastating. It seems like the pendulum swung too far in the opposite direction from how we treated mental illness in the previous century (aggressively locking people up in institutions). It would be a huge benefit to society if we could find a (relatively safe from abuse) mechanism to treat people who are "functional" yet too mentally ill to stop their sel…

> It seems like the pendulum swung too far in the opposite direction from how we treated mental illness in the previous century (aggressively locking people up in institutions).

I'd argue it's more of the same: finding a way to pretend they don't exist.

Re: U.S. alcohol-related deaths have doubled, study says

#44

Post by umvi »

ronnier wrote: post #12

The state of men in the US is really deteriorating. Men are drugging, drinking, and smoking theirselves to death. And sometimes the death is very explicit, being by suicide which is climbing to rates higher than ever. Prisons are filled with men, universities are increasingly seeing fewer men than women. Men are increasingly sexless much longer than females. Seems we have a big problem on our hands.

From TFA: "Some of the greatest increases were found among women ..."

Re: U.S. alcohol-related deaths have doubled, study says

#47

Post by paulcole »

elliotec wrote: post #29
wjossey wrote: post #5

My father died in July of 2015 from alcohol, at the very young age of 60. He drank daily, and then slowly stopped moving due to other health issues related to back pain. After refusing rehab and other options, he eventually died at his home one evening. His drinking buddy was my step-mother, who followed an identical trajectory. Less than four years later, she died in the same spot of the house, in her late 50s. The…

What legal recourse were you looking for? What court battle would you have gotten into around this?

Yeah I agree, like isn't that the way it should be? An independent adult doing what they want and what's legal shouldn't have to go to court over it.

Re: U.S. alcohol-related deaths have doubled, study says

#48

Post by murph-almighty »

wall o' text

Alcohol kind of creeps up on you over time.

I was in Greek Life in college. I don't regret a second of it, but the drinking culture was omnipresent (we did have dry brothers but if you drank you drank).

After college I moved back home. I had a few concerning episodes that one could "pass" as a mildly embarassing thing (vomiting after a comedy show once I was home, passing out during a family party). The first time my drinking came to a head was when my then-SO called me at a work retreat and I realized I had consumed about 30 drinks in the past 4 days- I was violently hungover and unable to consume food.

Several months later, we broke up, a relative died, and I came into enough money to pay off a significant enough chunk of my loans so that I could move out. During this time my therapist suggested I curb my drinking but I didn't really take him all that seriously. Dumb things kept happening- the most prominent event during this period was that I vomited while drunk gaming online with friends. Sometime after this I took my therapist's advice to quit drinking for a week. My mind cleared up a lot but I resumed after.

Things came to a head when I woke up one day after a day-long bout of drinking (I went to a tailgate and ended up going out to bars later that night). I felt like my liver was going to explode. The worst part was that I had errands to do that day and the entire time I felt like I was going to die.

I decided to indefinitely quit drinking. This was over this past November and December, and I had a few holiday parties to go to- I mostly teetotaled at them, but one conversation stuck out to me. A college friend who was older than me told me she had to re-calibrate her drinking life post-grad to function normally. I kind of realized that I hadn't done that.

I've started drinking again but I've kept it much more muted. I don't go to my local bar after work anymore. I don't really club. I never really drank alone much (the online gaming this was an outlier), so stopping that wasn't hard.

I do think there's a way to curb bad drinking habits, and I think I'm making headway in doing that, but the key is to recognize that your habits are problematic. Right now my mantra is

1) Have a predefined limit 2) Nurse the drink (I drink everything fast, so this is hardest) 3) Don't let people pressure you. Don't feel the need to drink at someone else's pace. Don't feel the need to take shots because someone bought them from the group.

I know this isn't perfect, and I'm not truly abstaining for good, but I'm in a way better place than I was before.

Don't make excuses for yourself. If you feel like alcohol is impacting you, do something about it.

Re: U.S. alcohol-related deaths have doubled, study says

#49

Post by claudeganon »

ab_testing wrote: post #15
claudeganon wrote: post #11

Between this, the spike in suicides across the US, and the opioid crisis, the US appears to be experiencing a kind of “die off” whose only analogue I can think of is post-Soviet Russia. I wonder if we’ll be able to correct course or continue to believe that things like rising GDP, unmoored from the material reality of most people, can paper over these trends.

The US is not experiencing a die-off. The net population growth in the US is still positive. More births and deaths. Combined that with a net positive immigration, the US is not susceptible to falling population levels like those of in Japan and Russia

> The net population growth in the US is still positive.

By something like half a percent. Simultaneously birth rates are decreasing to near historic lows, immigration is being constricted, millennial life expectancy is on the decline, and suicides have spiked across all age groups.

Yes, I’ll concede that we’re not at the level of Russia or Japan yet, but something has definitely gone off the rails and not trending in a great direction.

Re: U.S. alcohol-related deaths have doubled, study says

#50

Post by downerending »

ronnier wrote: post #12

The state of men in the US is really deteriorating. Men are drugging, drinking, and smoking theirselves to death. And sometimes the death is very explicit, being by suicide which is climbing to rates higher than ever. Prisons are filled with men, universities are increasingly seeing fewer men than women. Men are increasingly sexless much longer than females. Seems we have a big problem on our hands.

This isn't a popular sentiment, and is getting downvoted, but none of these statements appears to be false.

The state of things does seem rather demoralizing, and it does weigh on me. (I think women suffer equally and will eventually catch up on this problem.)

Some of this has affected me very personally. Subjectively, it feels like I drink a lot to ameliorate these affects. I'm aware that statistically it will shorten my life, but living a shorter, less painful life is a hard alternative to give up.

I have no answers, and I don't think there are any.

[Study link: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/acer.14239 Beware the awful log-scaling of plots.]

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