Word: vaillants
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...alcoholic predetermined by his genes? Vaillant believes there is a connection, noting that one out of three victims has a close relative who is alcoholic. But he doubts that researchers will ever find the biochemical marker. "I think it would be as unlikely as finding one for basketball playing," he says. "The best analogy is most coronary heart disease, which is not due to twisted genes or to a specific disease. There is a genetic contribution, and the rest of it is due to maladaptive lifestyle: too much fat, too little exercise. One gets alcoholism not because one does something...
Certain ethnic groups, Vaillant found, are collectively maladaptive. Irish men in the study generally grew up in families where alcohol was forbidden, drinking took place apart from meals and away from home, and male drunkenness was tacitly admired. The Irish in the survey also became alcohol dependent seven times as frequently as the Italians, who as children learned that drunkenness was frowned on and drank with family groups and with meals (thus diminishing the addictive effect of the alcohol "high"). To Vaillant, these sharp differences (which are also true of the more alcoholic Northern Europeans as contrasted to moderate Jews...
...high number of children of alcoholics who become addicted, Vaillant believes, is due less to biological factors than to poor role models. Being raised in a warm, close-knit family does not lessen a child's chances of becoming an alcoholic, nor does coming from a family with many problems increase the risk. Vaillant is reluctant to make predictions about behavior, but believes that the best sign that a child may not develop into an alcoholic as an adult is an "ineffable" quality-ego strength-that seems to come from experiencing a sense of competence when the person...
...hottest argument among experts on alcoholism these days is over whether an alcoholic can ever again return to social drinking without inevitably suffering a relapse. Vaillant, who constantly repeats that alcoholism is a problem that can be described only in grays, not in black or white, says that it all depends on how sick the alcoholic is: "If you have a little bit of alcoholism, as if you have a little bit of diabetes, you can control it." But Vaillant warns, "By the time a clinician identifies a person as an alcoholic, it's almost always too late...
...immediate, desperate question for millions of Americans is neither why nor how a person becomes an alcoholic, but how to treat the affliction. The first step, writes Vaillant, is recognizing that alcoholism is "neither a psychological symptom nor some vague unnamed metabolic riddle waiting to be deciphered." It is not a sin, but a progressive disease that may take years to acquire, and from which it may take years to recover. Writes Vaillant: "The task is to convince the patient not that he or she is an alcoholic, but that he or she is a decent person...