(1995). The average age at which alcoholics reported beginning to drink regularly was 16 for the men surveyed and 17 for the women. Moderate drinkers started regular alcohol use one to two years later.
A report in Alcoholism & Drug Abuse Week (1996) contends that a major problem in treating alcoholics is that most programs do not address the issue that relapses will occur. It says that most treatment centers lack an effective relapse strategy - a formal policy that recognizes the tendency of substance abusers to relapse and targets that problem from the moment clients enter treatment.
The report cites the Gateway Foundation, which operates 75 addiction programs at 50 sites in the Midwest and Southwest as an organization that recognizes the relapse problem and tries to identify relapse triggers, formulates new treatment experiences for clients who resume drinking, and involves clients more thoroughly in the treatment process.
The Gateway Foundation believes that a good relapse plan should include an assessment of lifestyle factors related to relapse, a list of personal warning signs that identify the specific steps that lead from stable recovery to relapse, warning-sign management strategies, and a revised recovery program that supports the ongoing identification and management of relapse warning signs in a low-cost community setting.
Adinoff, O'Neill and Ballenger (1995) believe that their is a link between alcohol withdrawal symptoms and the anxiety and craving that occurs during abstinence in alcohol-dependent patients. They suggest that the repeated experience of alcohol withdrawal and its associated limbic-neuronal discharge induces a permanent state of limbic hyperexcitability. This phenomenon is referred to as "kindling." Subsequent episodes of limbic discharge then may be precipitated during abstinence by alcohol-related cues or even may occur spontaneously. Subjectively experienced as anxiety or craving,...