
Surviving an Alcoholic - joshrotenberg
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/05/27/surviving-an-alcoholic/
======
grayclhn
I'd strongly encourage anyone who is upset or intrigued by this post to attend
an open Al-Anon meeting[1]. (AA is for alcoholics, Al-Anon is for friends and
family members of alcoholics. "Open" meetings mean that anyone curious is
welcome to attend; otherwise you're expected to be affected by a friend or
family member's drinking.)

TBH, the author seems remarkably nonjudgemental, given that her husband
undeniably drank himself to death a few years ago. Alcoholism's pretty shitty
all around.

[1]: [http://www.al-anon.org/how-to-find-a-meeting](http://www.al-
anon.org/how-to-find-a-meeting)

edit: "drinking" originally was "alcoholism" but I edited it after posting.
It's a small but important difference --- you don't have to believe that your
family member is an alcoholic to attend an Al-Anon meeting; you just have to
feel that their drinking is affecting you.

And, to be clear, this comment only reflects my opinion.

~~~
aantix
"In The Rooms" puts on several virtual AA meetings a day (via a custom video
system they built with OpenTok's APIs).

I sat in on a few while researching various non-typical video conferencing
systems.. [https://www.intherooms.com/](https://www.intherooms.com/)

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empressplay
This guy had a meltdown, full stop. If alcohol hadn't been there for him,
something else would have.

Don't get me wrong, alcohol is a nemesis of my own and I'm happy to point my
finger at it when it's warranted but this guy wasn't looking for existential
comfort from alcohol, he was shutting himself off (arguably with the intent of
doing so permanently). This was suicide-by-booze, the "suicide" being the more
relevant part here. The "booze" part could have been anything.

~~~
davydka
I was surprised that it 6 years to drink yourself to death. I agree it was
very sudden and that something must have happened to trigger that. I feel like
it could have been a genetic predisposition. Our bodies have lots of internal
alarms and triggers. Perhaps something went off that triggered this downward
spiral. A combination of environmental stresses coinciding with internal
clocks. We'll never know. This is definitely a sad story. I appreciate the
authors honesty about it. I'm very touched.

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wcummings
I wonder if the author is understating the role acetomenophen had

~~~
alrs
Of the $64K surreptitiously spent on liver abuse, I suspect that acetaminophen
accounted for less than $500.

~~~
fecak
You can do severe liver damage with under $10 of acetaminophen if you take the
wrong dose with alcohol.

~~~
alrs
I've had a family member in the hospital with a failed liver. I just gave a
eulogy for an old friend at his local NA meeting room.

Yes, you can hurt your liver with Tylenol. In the cases close to me, and in
the case described by the author, the culprit was clearly alcoholism.

Anecdotally, I've never heard a story about a man warned by his doctor to put
down the Acetaminophen who kept going and died within a year.

~~~
fecak
I too have seen liver failure, where acetaminophen use was mentioned by
doctors as a contributing factor. My comment was intended to highlight the
fact that the combination of even a relatively small amount (not overdose
levels) of acetaminophen combined with alcohol can be damaging.

Your comment about $500 worth of Tylenol seemed to diminish the role it could
play in damaging the liver of even someone with no addiction. And $500 buys a
huge amount of Tylenol.

The family member I lost (well-educated) was unaware of the
alcohol/acetaminophen combination being potentially damaging. My reply here
aims to inform anyone who may not be aware. Be careful.

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Devthrowaway80
Well, that answers the question of "should I skip my meeting tonight?" I
guess.

~~~
internetBuddies
But doesn't this count as a virtual meeting, since we're all transhumanists
here, and view the internet as a valid surrogate for social interaction?

------
mirimir
I found the piece very frustrating, because there's nothing about what drove
him to alcoholism. I can't imagine that he was intentionally combining
acetaminophen and alcohol to kill his liver. That's such a slow and painful
way to die!

As I read, I kept expecting to see something about physical pain that he was
suffering. But on the other hand, I recall a recent article about
acetaminophen effectively numbing affect. So maybe it does a better job of
that, when combined with alcohol.

------
booleanbetrayal
and this is why marijuana is a superior alternative for chemically-induced
escapism

~~~
adrusi
Except that as a method of escapism, alcohol is much more effective than hemp.
Alcohol numbs emotion, hemp simply slightly dissociates the user from it.

~~~
pics_at_last
I've never tried hemp. You make it sound like an excellent treatment. The aim
of all the mindfulness meditation is to observe your thoughts and feelings and
stay disassociated from them.

Much better than switching them off with alcohol.

------
juddlyon
If you know someone with an alcohol problem, encourage them to seek help.

~~~
aaron695
This is meaningless.

They know they need help. They don't need you to tell them.

[edit] Google for what you really should do. But this is quite bad advice.

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bambax
Wow. Some people can write!

Edit: surprised by the downvote; for what it's worth, there is zero irony in
this comment: I did find this piece very well written.

------
bsder
While I'm glad this is helping her to heal, I'm more interested in what could
have been done.

Why in the world would someone suddenly start drinking at a level where it
kills them? At age 45? This seems more like a mental health/depression spiral
and the alcoholism was self-medication.

Especially since the word "professor" is being thrown around. If I remember
correctly, there was some research that showed that men's hormones start going
haywire when their partner goes into menopause. Combine this with the fact
that a professor is always surrounded by young girls (professors have a higher
divorce rate than average), and I have to wonder about a lot of things.

Ultimately, it's his own damn fault. But, mental illness has its own stigma.

~~~
comrh
> mental health/depression spiral

> Ultimately, it's his own damn fault.

These seem incongruent. Is it really helpful to just say it was completely a
personal failure? If we're going to talk about addiction as a disease and its
comorbidity with mental illness surely "well he was a weak person" isn't
helpful?

~~~
bsder
So, it's _never_ your own fault?

This bothers me as much as it's _all_ your fault. You can't just commit
everybody who isn't "normal" all the time.

Being an illness that needs to be treated and being your own fault are not
mutually exclusive. If you have cardiovascular problems, drugs and surgery
help, but you also need to lose weight and exercise.

Mental illness is quite a bit less distinct. What is the border between
individual will and chemical machinery? People have been arguing that for
centuries, and we're not really any closer to a good answer.

In addition, I'm more than a little skeptical that he "suddenly" became an
alcoholic at 45. If he was 50 right now, he's right at then end of the "3
martini lunch" brigade that became socially unacceptable about 1990. I suspect
he may have been consuming a borderline alcoholic amount of alcohol, but that
something finally pushed him over the limit.

Ultimately, it's just tragic irrespective of fault.

~~~
billjings
There are definitely folks that hit some kind of life event and it's all of a
sudden it goes from "gets lit up a bit too often" to "drinking too much to
participate in humanity". Probably the most common is retirement.

------
jacobtracey
What a bitter, twisted thing to write about a dead person.

It seems her husbands problems have become a large part of her identity, and
what greater way to feel better than write an opinion piece about how shitty
he was in the NYT?

~~~
mylons
He drug her down with him. There's no excuse for that.

~~~
jacobtracey
I wasn't excusing anything, simply stating that perhaps airing ones dirty
laundry - particularly about a dead person - in a newspaper no less, just
seems bitter.

~~~
vacri
It's comments like this that shame people talking about hard times in their
life, and help perpetuate the problem. The author even leads off with how
she's shamed into not talking about the problem.

The article is also not the hatchet-job you're painting it as. She's not
abusive towards her late husband, but talking about how the alcoholism screwed
them both over. By shaming people into not talking about this, you're also
preventing people from finding parallels in their own life, or finding out
about support groups.

~~~
jacobtracey
She claims to be ashamed to admit to a periodontist that her husband died of
alcohol related causes...

Then proceeds to describe on a hugely trafficked website how he urinated in a
basement sink every night and left her with $64,000 of credit card debt.

I have no desire to shame anyone, it's written now - again I simply stated
that it felt bitter to me. Having spent 15 minutes reading her blog, it seems
that is a reasonable description of her current mental state.

~~~
vacri
Human emotion is a complex thing. Clearly she's hit a wall where she's tired
of having to hide what happened, and is using an appropriate venue for
discussing it - an opinion article. The article wasn't trying to shame or
defame her late husband, but describe the kind of events that happened to her
and how they affected her.

It's very clear that you were trying to shame writing about this taboo, at
least in your initial comment. You weren't 'simply stating', but were making
value judgements - the writing was 'twisted', and she was trying to make
herself feel better by shitting on her husband. She may well be in a poor
mental state, but it's been six years since the guy died. How long do you want
to keep up "don't speak ill of the dead"? By maintaining that taboo in an
ongoing manner, you're preventing people from _getting better_ by talking
about the bad things they encountered with the deceased person.

~~~
jacobtracey
Personally I don't feel that airing someones dirty laundry on a huge website
is an appropriate venue. Isn't this exactly what support groups like AlAnon
and therapy aim to address in a more delicate manner?

~~~
grayclhn
Dude, that's exactly what you're doing here. But your anger towards the author
is a lot more mysterious than the author's anger towards her dead husband. If
you're wondering why someone would write an angry comment on the internet that
you think reflects badly on her, look inward.

~~~
jacobtracey
I'm not airing anything except I think her article was bitter - you can read
into that until the cows come home.

