Alcoholism

Social and Personal Costs of Alcoholism

Treatment for Alcoholism: The Medical Model

Conclusion and Recommendations for Future Research

Few would disagree that alcoholism is costly for those identified as alcoholics and for those close to them, as well as for the culture that has identified alcoholism as a social problem. Even fewer, however, seem to agree on the best way of responding to it. Evidence that alcohol dependence is destructive, is balanced by compelling evidence that the methods brought to bear on overcoming such dependence are so variable and fraught with unanticipated consequences, whether in the clinic or the courtroom, that reasonable people might be forgiven for suggesting that alcoholism is a problem that cannot be solved. What is required first of all if the problem of alcoholism is to be effectively solved is clear thinking about it.

The fact that alcoholism has been recognized by clinicians as a disease has passed into general knowledge in the culture; however, characterizing alcoholism as a disease is a clinical practice of relative

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substance abuse of any kind in the black community is connected, at least in part, to the failure of the dominant culture to sufficiently include African Americans as full participants. Blake and Darling (1994), as well as Roberts (1994), cite problems of social and economic integration faced in particular by African American males, noting connections between unemployment, poverty, high rates of death, and substance abuse on one hand, and the pressures of the mainstream culture on black men to conform to mainstream values despite the tendency to divide black men from the mainstream on the other. Blake and Darling cite the mixed message that the white culture sends to black culture, suggesting that such problems as substance abuse have a primarily social rather than physical or even individual psychological basis. Roberts (1994) asserts that mainstream-culture pressure is implicated in making black men more vulnerable to peer pressure that may include a tendency toward alcohol or drug abuse. Peer-group attitudes appear to have a significant influence on the psychology, level, and style of drinking among African Americans. Lo and Globetti (1993) describe a longitudinal study of high-school students who began college (at a predomina

Category: Psychology - A