Alcoholism is a chronic, incurable, progressive, fatal disease that affects and destroys all areas of human life – body, psyche, soul and social life. Alcoholism is incurable in the sense that once a person has lost control over his drinking, he will never regain that control. No matter how long the period of abstinence from alcohol is.
Accordingly, the treatment of alcoholism is for the person to learn how to live without drinking alcohol at all. Unfortunately, very many people, even those who are committed to a healthy lifestyle, consume quite a lot of alcohol, claiming that it has many positive qualities. In fact, these claims are just myths.
Signs of Alcoholism
Nevertheless, alcoholism, like any other disease, has quite certain symptoms, counting the twelve main signs of alcoholism:
The first of these includes an increase in tolerance (tolerance, tolerance) to alcohol.
The second symptom of alcoholism is the appearance of hangover syndrome the day after drinking. Its signs are a headache, nausea, depression, a feeling of thirst, weakness and brokenness.
The third sign of alcoholism is the desire (and need) to hangover. That is, to take some minimal dose of alcohol to help restore your strength and improve your well-being.
The next sign of alcoholism is loss of control over the amount you drink. After one or two first drinks, a person loses control over himself, cannot stop and stops taking alcohol only when he runs out of alcohol or passes out of consciousness.
Another symptom of alcoholism is loss of control of the situation at the moment of the highest intoxication. The person ceases to understand who he is, where he is, his behavior does not always correspond to the situation, without any special reason he can start crying, laughing, tides of love for his neighbor unpredictably change into fits of rage and hatred. In addition, the control of homosexual impulses, which are normally suppressed, is reduced while intoxicated. Anyone can observe two drunken friends shaking hands for a long time, kissing each other on the hickey, confessing their respect and love for each other. Why don’t they do this when they’re sober? Maybe it’s that what’s on a sober person’s mind, is not on a drunk person’s tongue? Or something else.
The sixth sign of the disease is alcoholic memory loss (amnesia). The patients who have reached this phase of alcoholism may not remember anything the next morning and may find out from the people around them a lot of interesting things about what they did yesterday. Unfortunately, traditions of our society allow good-natured, lenient attitude towards such behavior which promotes further human degradation, growth of domestic criminality which in most cases is committed due to “drinking”. In Western Europe, for example, showing a drunkard a tape recording of all of his drunken “tricks” is one of the methods used to raise him. And as some sources of information assure, very effective.
The seventh symptom of alcoholism is the presence of binge drinking. “Overdose” experts call such a state, when the intake of alcohol continues for more than two days in a row.
The eighth symptom of alcoholism is an appetite disorder during a binge. Appetite is so reduced that it is enough to eat a slice of lemon or a cucumber to experience a feeling of satiety.
Together with the appetite disorder during binge drinking comes the sleep disorder (the ninth symptom of alcoholism). While in this condition most of the patients sleep during the day and have a lot of trouble sleeping at night. Trying to escape the vicious circle, they start resorting to the help of alcohol to fall asleep at night, but the situation only worsens.
The tenth symptom of alcoholism includes the emergence of anxiety and fears during binge drinking. The patient begins to be frightened by the silence in the apartment, he is in a state of continuous, anxious anticipation. To get rid of such a state, according to experts, many patients even sleep with a bottle under the pillow. The next link in the chain of transformation of a healthy person into a mental, physical and moral invalid is the occurrence of auditory and visual hallucinations. This is the very condition when a person is said to be “drunk out of his mind”.