Focus 580; Happy Hours: Alcohol in a Womans Life

In this part of focus 580 will be talking about alcohol and women. If for a long time until really fairly recently alcoholism was considered to be mostly a man's disease and perhaps not surprising when you take a look at research prevention efforts and treatment all of that was aimed at men despite the fact that at least 25 percent of alcoholics are women. For women the effects of alcohol on their body are different. One might argue that the various dimensions of alcoholism are different and that when it comes to prevention and treatment the approach needs to be different. This morning in this part of focus 580 will be talking with a journalist who has written the book on the subject Her name is Devonshire sled. She has written for publications including The New York Times USA Today read book glamour. She won an O'Henry Award for writing in 1901 she's taught courses in women's studies and creative writing at Middlebury College and is administrative director of the bread loaf

Writers Conference the book we're talking about is titled Happy Hours alcohol and a woman's life published by Cliff Street Books which is a division of Harper Collins. As we talked this morning with our guest questions of course are welcome. Comments are welcome. All we ask of callers is that people just try to be brief and just so that we can keep things moving along and include as many different people as possible. Well but certainly your questions comments are a welcome 3 3 3 W I L L and toll free 800 to 2 to W while those are the numbers to call. Well good morning welcome to the show. Well thank you David. I'm I have to admit that I have been having a hard time with your name and if I maul it you're just going to have to give me particularly your last name I guess I'm not quite sure it's Devonshire result yourselves. OK so maybe I have a little touch of dyslexia I keep wanting to say your sled. You're not the only one. Well anyway thank you very much for

talking with us today. Maybe to begin we might talk about the subject that you really start with in the book where you talk about the the difference in the effect of alcohol on men and women. I think we have this idea of sort of people have this idea that there is some relationship between the amount of alcohol you consume and and body weight and that your size has something to do with it and indeed it does but one of the things that you point out and people need to appreciate is that if you take a man and woman of equivalent size and give them the same amount of alcohol the effects are going to be different. And it goes beyond this issue of of how big you are. Women's bodies handle alcohol differently than men. That's that's really true and that happy hour is what I do is I sort of posit a man and a woman Pete and Laurie who are both £140 and talk about the effects on their bodies if they both say I have four drinks a day something like that and

and it's it was really surprising to me in doing this research just how different the effect could be on men and on women. Some of them are I think the thing that surprised me the most is that women are are at risk for cirrhosis of the liver at as little as two drinks a day. So that's that's only one difference. Women do get a higher blood alcohol level with the same amount of drinks if they're the same weight. They have less of a particular enzyme that breaks down alcohol in the stomach lining. So that's part of the issue they also have a higher percentage of body fat. So that alcohol is more concentrated in their body fluids but they're more vulnerable to liver disease to brain damage heart muscle problems all sorts of problems develop after a few years of problem drinking for women. And among other things that I guess there was some thinking that. High levels of alcohol consumption might increase a woman's risk of breast cancer.

That's true and some people are really have been mistakenly reassured on that count because there was a study a few years ago that showed that with lighter with small levels of drinking there was no increased risk for breast cancer which is really good news and women should who are drinking moderately should feel reassured on that score. But that it's really important to remember that that was for light and moderate drinking there were not enough women drinking heavily in that store and that study to rule out problems of breast cancer for them and previous studies showed that a woman's risk of breast cancer increases by as much as 40 percent if she's drinking heavily which is you know three four drinks a day. Actually I should say heavy drinking is considered two drinks a day for a woman. But what we know that the breast cancer risk goes way up at higher levels than that. So we know that as far as women are concerned they are the problems associated with using alcohol are greater than for men in equivalent amounts of alcohol. But then it also sounds as if it is

easier for a woman to become alcohol dependent than it is for a man because because of the same sorts of sort of thing. Yeah women become alcohol dependent more quickly after a few years of drinking and with less alcohol in their systems. That's true. The something. That you write about in it certainly I'm sure complicates the way that we think about women and drinking. Is goes back to the fact that we do think of it as being a man's disease and also the fact that our our attitudes toward men and women who may have problems with alcohol are very different in as much as we would say that alcohol dependence is a problem. I think we tend to cut men some some slack on this. We sort of say oh well that's a thing that guys do and we're willing to be a little bit more forgiving. But certainly we're much more that sort of posture we take toward women who are heavy drinkers is much

different that you know I think you're touching on probably the most important different most important difference between men and women's alcohol problems because that is shoe of the shame that women feel when they when they become alcoholic is you know it affects every aspect of their disease it affects their motivation to get treatment they're more likely to hide their drinking. They already may be drinking in part to get rid of feelings of shame which are intensified by people's responses to them. It's true that we think you know a man who drinks heavily doesn't necessarily think of himself as less of a man because he drinks heavily there are a lot of really. Positive Images of male drinking. So now we have the the macho drunk we have the poetic drunk who drinks have link goes home and writes brilliant poetry or brilliant novels. There are a lot of ways to drink heavily and still feel like a real man. But I can't think of any images of women in the movies or in

our you know in our national imagination or international imagination actually that has the female alcoholic being a figure of romance or interest really. All of the images of women drinking are negative that we have the idea of a drunken woman as being a whore or a slut. You know it's terrible sexual stigma attached to female alcoholism. And also we think of her as being unnatural especially if she has children. You know a man who doesn't come home from the bar to talk his kids into bed you know we don't like that if he doesn't see his kids after work. But if a woman doesn't see your kids after work because she's off at the bar drinking our our we become much more judge mental and condemning So you know a woman's role in society means that she's judged very much more harshly and it affects every aspect of her drinking. And I suppose that puts even greater pressure on the woman to keep her drinking hidden. And that might also explain how it is that people will say

if they have someone close to them they discover a woman who has an alcohol problem that they can and they can say with genuine surprise that they didn't know even though this might have been something that had been going on for years. You know that that's really true. And I think it works in two different ways I think sometimes women do feel so much shame that they hide their drinking. And are very good at hiding that. But also the families are so reluctant to see an alcohol problem in a woman that even when it's staring them in the face sometimes they don't see it. I interviewed one woman for happy hours who managed to hide her drinking from her husband for I think it was eight or ten years. She was heavily drinking without his knowing it and he was you know truly truly astonished even though all of the signs were right there in front of him all those years. And that's to me and I'm sure to a lot of people who would hear a story like that that would astonish them they would say How could you how could that possibly be that someone

that close to you would be drinking heavily for that many years and that you wouldn't notice. No I was myself so astonished by it that I didn't believe it for a little while. But in talking to clinicians I find out that it's not an unusual story. And maybe one other point here. We talked about the fact that it seems because we because of the way we think about alcohol men and women that it may be difficult for us to accept this idea of a woman alcoholic that not only is that an issue for people who will who would be close to her in her life but it's also an issue for any health care professional she might deal with it. It's seems to have been the case maybe still at some somewhat the case for doctors and other people like that to be reluctant to diagnose alcohol in a woman again because they have this idea that well alcoholism is something that you see in men. Well I wish I could tell you that that had changed in recent years but most recent studies suggest that that has not changed that doctors are still there. More likely to miss that alcohol dependence on a woman than they are in a man and I have to say that

they're not so so good at finding and men either there. There are a lot of problems and diagnosing alcoholism partly because the people who become dependent on alcohol do become very good at hiding that they they want to protect their drinking habit because they're addicted to it and they don't they don't want to have it taken away so you know they do make it hard for doctors but there are ways for doctors to get around the denial of their patients and help them you know confront them at least with an alcohol problem. They're in women they're more likely to diagnose depression and not know that the depression is coming from the alcohol problem and especially interestingly they're likely to miss an alcohol problem in a woman if she is affluent enough to have good insurance. Interestingly because again of the stereotypes we talk about they are more likely to think of a bad lady as an alcoholic and not a middle class woman with good insurance. Our guest is Devonshire seld She's author of the book Happy Hours alcohol in a woman's

life is published by published by Cliff Street Books which is a division of Harper Collins. Questions are certainly welcome if you'd like to be a part of the conversation. 3 3 3 9 4 5 5. We also have toll free life line a good for anyone who's listening and if it would be long distance call for you. Use that number that's 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 5. Sometimes I think too that the very term alcoholism and the various images that we attach to it make it a problematic and sometimes not a very useful term. And I think that that's that also makes it possible for people who are in denial about themselves or their family members to say well I'm not an alcoholic or my wife my sister my whoever it is is not an alcoholic because of the way we think about what an alcoholic is I think that's not just just that we think it's men and women but particularly I think when it comes to high functioning alcoholics.

You know I think that's a really good point David and sometimes I try to train myself not to use the word alcoholic because as you say people have a specific image in their minds about what that isn't so negative that they won't apply it to themselves or their loved ones. Because it's just there's too much stigma attached to it. The technic I mean really doctors and and health care other kinds of health conditions I think in terms of alcohol abuse and alcohol dependence and abuses is technically drinking too much or too often in spite of of of reasons not to so let's say it causes health problems or you drink and drive or you're not able to fulfill your obligations at work or in relationships because if you're drinking any any if alcohol is interfering in your life in any way and you're still drinking that's alcohol abuse alcohol dependence is all of those things as well as an increased tolerance

so that it takes you more alcohol to get high if it takes a woman three drinks to feel high. You know she's probably been developing tolerance. That's that's part of it. Part of it is having withdrawal symptoms if you stop drinking. And part of it is difficulty cutting back not being able to stop even when you want to. Not to say that alcoholics are people who are alcohol dependent. Can't stop for two weeks even if they want to prove to themselves that they're not alcoholic. People often do that and successfully and then start drinking again. But someone who's alcohol dependent probably can't keep that up they probably can't say all right I'm not going to drink any more than two beers a day and stick to that. They're more likely to have lots of reasons why they can on the special occasion of someone's wedding or on the sad occasion of someone's funeral or whatever it is there will be a reason to drink more than those two beers over a stretch of time. Maybe I should give you the opportunity to talk a little bit about your own experience because indeed it

was an experience that you had with your sister that put you intimately in touch with this issue but then also led you as a journalist to want to explore it. Particularly looking at this at the whole question of what kind of treatment is available for women and how does treatment need to be different. When you're talking about women as opposed to men. Well that's right and my own experience it was my sister's struggle with alcoholism. That led me to the topic about four years ago she was in a really bad place she'd been drinking chronically for many years and I was worried that I was going to lose her sooner rather than later. So I thought I had developed ways of coping of dealing with the problem and staying in touch with her but not trying to control her all the things I knew that I was supposed to do but I panicked I thought I was going to lose her. She was drinking so heavily at the time. And I'm happy to say now she's doing really well. She's been been sober for quite a while now and much much better. But at that time I

I just was desperate to find out how other women had been helped. And to to learn as much as I could partly just to deal with my own energy and frustration and pain on the topic so I interviewed 40 women in recovery and a lot of clinicians and therapists and researchers scientists and did a lot of reading to pull this book together. I want to ask you about one thing in particular and I think that people who have an alcoholic family member they seek out various kinds of advice from or from. Various kinds of professionals about what they can do to persuade a person who is reluctant or resistant to have treatment and I think often the advice they're given is well what you have to do is cut yourself actually cut yourself off from that person to say to them until you until you get on this until you get yourself help. I'm not going to talk to you I'm not going to call I'm not going to see you. And

that somehow only the threat of losing their family can push people to the point where they'll admit that they have a problem and then they go have help and that seems to be really problematic. A lot of people when they get that advice are very unhappy about it. What do you think about that and Dan Do people still hear the. From professionals. Well. I heard it myself one night when I was really in a panic again you know I thought I have been dealing with this all really well and I got a call from my sister and realized that her blood alcohol level was so high that you know she could die. And I called an AA hotline and that's the advice I got. A fellow answered and said You know I've got to tell you you just got to tell your sister you'll never talk to her again unless she gets sober. And it really was very upsetting to me to hear that. I was sure I mean I never really gave that consideration I knew that it was the wrong advice for me and for my sister. Now this fellow had had been had got

sober specifically because his own mother had told him finally that she couldn't handle it she couldn't see him anymore until he was sober. And it was what prompted him into recovery. So I mean it really does work for some people. And you know and more to the point some relatives or spouses or family members are really in a position where they're in a lot of pain they're over involved in the alcoholic for life. And the only healthy thing to do is to say I can't handle this anymore. Come and see me when you're sober. You know that sometimes the right way to go but it's by no means universal advice I mean good advice for everybody it was it was wrong for me and my sister. I'm sure that my consistent contact with her. I know she tells me that it was meaningful to her and give her the support now that helps her have the courage to stay sober and do the work. Not only my support but that's part of her life and part of her life and and many of the women I interviewed told me of

a person who who stayed supportive and encouraging and didn't try to and I didn't try to force them to stop drinking or try to control them but kept contact. So I think your point's a good one David that you know any time there's sort of one size fits all advice you know you're in trouble because every situation is a little bit different. Everyone's capacities are a little bit different. I interviewed one woman for happy hours who was who had a couple of small children this is an African-American woman with a couple of small children who was so alcoholic so in such trouble as she was thinking of killing herself. Sister showed up at her door took her on the bus with her children to her own home in Minnesota kept her in her apartment. She actually gave her a bath. She did everything but spoon feed her. She took care of her children all without trying to get her to stop drinking or trying to manipulate her in any way she just went off to work every day came back and every night this woman

Louise that I interviewed said she could hear her sister in the next room in the bedroom praying please God help me help my sister please God help me help my sister. And you know by many people when they hear the story our would say Well Louisa sister was enabling her to keep on drinking by giving her a place to stay and taking care of her children and bathing her and providing for her financially. But really what happened was that Luis had the time she needed to pull herself together and to decide that she wanted to get sober. So you know one day her sister came home and and there was Louise all dressed ready to go out and look for an apartment of her own. And and to start her own recovery process. I don't want to recommend that for families I certainly myself could not have have invited my sister into my home and taken care of her that way and I don't think it would have been good for her. But I just do want to point out that there are so many different ways that people come to recovery and it's really important

when you go for help that you know the person you're going to help for isn't really listening to us and helping you with your particular situation. Yeah I think that's a really important point is this idea that people who are heavy drinkers they find lots of different reasons to stop. And I think maybe we've put too much emphasis on the idea of hitting bottom the idea that the only thing that can persuade a person to stop is when they felt that they've lost everything which could mean Home Job wife children family husband everything and I think that that's that indeed may have been the story for some people but probably. Should not give people the idea that that's what everybody's got to go through. That's right and really that model of hitting bottom was based on the experiences of middle class white men who really already had lives that were successful and really it was alcohol that caused them to lose their job or whatever and they really

did have to hit bottom before they could realize that they couldn't control their drinking. But for a lot of people if you say well they haven't hit their bottom yet while their bottom is death you know. So the idea of waiting for their bottom for them to get help. It's just not not possible it's not practical. So it's true we need to think of have new ways of of what we need to have a broader sense of the different kinds of people who are dependent on alcohol and. One of the the thoughts I had while you were speaking is that one of the one of the somewhat newer approaches is to realize that you can kind of raise the bottom for many people so that you can you can in interventions with professionals for instance you can have the people who love the alcoholic and the boss of the alcoholic et cetera. Let them know how the alcohol is experiencing it is affecting their lives. And you know sometimes it is helpful for a wife to say to a husband or husband to say to a wife you know I won't be able to tolerate it beyond this point in any way that. There are a lot of different

approaches but certainly the idea at the bottom is one that's that controversial and not right for everyone. I should again introduce our guest here a little bit past our midpoint We're talking with Devonshire seld. She is the author of the book Happy Hours alcohol and a woman's life published by Cliff Street Books a division of Harper Collins. Our guest is a journalist she's contributed essays and stories and different publications including the York Times USA Today read book and glamour. She is administrative director of the bread loaf writers conference and also has taught courses in both women's studies and creative writing at Middlebury College. Your questions or comments certainly are welcome. The number here in Champaign Urbana 3 3 3 9 4 5 5 toll free 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 5 1 going back to the premise that the differences between men and women and their experiences with alcohol one of the things that is is evident and

I'm sure problematic is the fact that at. Mention here in the book that alcoholic women are more likely than alcoholic men to have a mental health disorder particularly depression although there can be other things like anxiety and eating disorders and this seems to be something that sometimes is really difficult to untangle. Whether depression led to the drinking or drinking lead to depression and I don't know maybe in the final analysis. That really doesn't matter which way it goes but it suggests that it's a much that for women the psychological aspects of this may be more complicated. Yeah it's true that women do have tend to have more complicated mental health history than men who are alcohol dependent. They are more likely to be depressed as well it's common among men as well. But more often men become depressed you know after they've started the drinking and women that they've often more often have the problem

before they started drinking so. That does factor into two recovery needs for sure but there are other issues. Younger women women under 30 who are alcohol dependent and there are a number of those growing number 72 percent of them also have an eating disorder and most strikingly a very large percentage of alcohol dependent women have been sexually abused in childhood. So this is in some ways the most striking finding that there is about women in alcoholism and it has a massive effect on recovery needs. A woman who's been sexually abused and is also dependent on alcohol can't you know just focus on getting sober and then deal with her other problems later which is the traditional model. She really needs help from the beginning with their sexual abuse because very often and many of the women I interviewed in fact started drinking when they started remembering the sexual abuse. Sometimes that was in teenage years that's a very

common time to start remembering childhood sexual abuse. Sometimes one woman I spoke with very recently started remembering not that she had forgotten but you know she had managed to push it out of her head until she was about 35 and then was having a lot of flashbacks and panic and the drinking as a way sometimes for women to not remember to to become preoccupied and sometimes just to stay in that alcoholic cycle where you're craving a during core or you're drunk or you're recover or you're having withdrawal symptoms. It keeps you from dealing with the sexual abuse. These women very often need all women's therapy groups. They need all women. AA meetings or women for sobriety meetings whatever their support group is very often it needs to be all women for them to be feel safe. So there are a lot there are many different correlates of alcohol problems in women. Well it goes to the idea that and maybe it's something that people. Recognized

that it seems that a lot of people who are abusing alcohol are medicating themselves and then the question becomes well why you know what and what is it that they're trying to. What sort of pain are they trying to numb. And that here based on the differences in experience between men and women it's it's different. It's something of the same issue maybe because it's involved in numbing pain but is that the nature of it that's different. Yeah that's right. That's that's true it's could be self-medication for both men and women. I think it often is. But as you say it it can be specifically sexual abuse and for women you know can be current domestic abuse as well. Women who were actually abused and childhood are also more vulnerable to violence as adults. And so their self-medication. Women are often a really common theme among the women I interviewed for happy hours I was was drinking to either to take the

place of a relationship to make them feel better about a relationship that wasn't mutual and wasn't satisfying. And sometimes you know very often in fact too. To try to make themselves more acceptable within the relationship. So for instance I'm thinking of one woman in happy hours to who was sort of jealous of her husband and angry at him because of his successful career and she had chosen to stay home with the children and she didn't. She didn't think she should be feeling that way she thought she she had made this choice and she should be happy as a mother and she drank really because it made her angry feelings melt away and when she was with her husband she felt sort of warm and loving and all the things that she thought it was right for a woman to feel. It touches off a memory Do I remember that somewhere in the in the book here and I'm looking for it and not finding it there's a line something to the effect that for women alcoholism is

primarily about loneliness. Well yes I really I'd say that the conviction that grew the most as I worked on happy hour is that I'm left with very strongly is how much alcoholism is about isolation isolation it for women. It's and that can be true. One woman I interviewed is a lawyer who really only drank socially only with friends and had a lot of friends and you you wouldn't have thought of her as an isolated person. But even she was I was emotionally really isolated. She she said that she she really thought she drank to say I'm not what I look like I'm not who you think I am. I don't have this. I look like I have a perfect life but I'm cut off I'm lonely. I'm a fraud and and that's just one example really. Drinking often starts off to ease those feelings of being isolated and give you a kind of false sense of connection because it does do that. And then ultimately it it

isolates you further. So that recovery is really about hewing those broken connections to yourself your own feelings to your family to your community to your spirituality to god if you believe in God so. It's really about reaching out and I think that's why I think really important for anyone listening and anyone struggling to to know that if since alcoholism is so much about isolation you really can't get better alone. You need to you need to reach out and get help. We have several callers to talk with why don't we do that starting in. Well take them in the order in which they came in starting with Aurora line number four. Hello. Yes. This really continues to be a very difficult difficult problem in our world. I wonder I just turn the program on a few minutes ago did you speak to the fact. And I know it isn't emotionally correct

to give somebody a guilt problem but is it ever discussed what the alcohol is going to do to these adult children when these children when they grow up and be adults. Oh absolutely it's. You know it's a difficult problem I did interview many people whose mothers were alcoholic and who were very very angry. And when we understand alcoholism as you know something that's a disease and something that the drinker can't help it doesn't mean that the drinker isn't accountable and isn't responsible and really part of the healing process is it isn't for the alcoholic to hear how she has hurt other people and for the family of the alcoholic to be educated about alcoholism to understand that the alcoholic wasn't just trying to hurt people but was trapped in this compulsive cycle. I don't know if that speaks to your to your question does it.

Yes I think it does because I think if there's anybody listening maybe this is a thought they hadn't thought of before because these things that are long range they're hard to think. It's hard to think about today what will be in the life of your child of 10 to 15 20 years later. You mean a very difficult thing when you're when you're dealing with a problem that's a crisis in your whole life. How can you think about what you're doing to somebody in the next if 10 15 years from now you can think about it. You're only thinking about today and the dilemma you have with your alcoholism. You know I would say from my experience in interviewing women for happy hours that a lot of people when they see say a mother who's alcoholic who's drinking they think she doesn't care and they think that she doesn't feel guilt or shame and and the truth is it's very far from that. Usually these women are crippled by their shame and the pain they feel

of the women that I talk to would talk about how their children when they're one of their children would go down into the basement and just hide and how her heart just aches for this little boy. And another one talked about how she went into labor after having been drinking for three days and the child took a long time coming because she'd been drunk and she couldn't even look at her baby when she was born and I thought you know about the hospital staff thought this woman didn't care about her baby but she couldn't look at her because she was so crippled by shame. So it's a very complicated problem. Yes yes yes. It really truly is truly is. Thank you for providing such a book. Oh thank you. For the Co. Maybe this is going to be good for me to introduce Again our guest Devonshire sold is the author of the book Happy Hours alcohol and a woman's life published by Cliff Street which is a division of Harper Collins the book should be out in the bookstores if you want to look at it. Questions also are welcome. Three three three. W I L L or 9 4 5 5 toll free

800. Two two two. Wy lo. Next we'll go to Terre Haute in Indiana. Line 1. Hello hello. Yes I do want to better research on the medical aspects of alcoholism. You know like I think women have a different set of Harmonix right now also their brain operates different man. And also the elf thing is alone there must be a DNA characteristic to people who you know become I'll call it like they ever put on the chair we did. We ductile a little bit at the beginning of the program but the first sort of issue that and that meant that women do process their bodies process alcohol differently than men. And for that reason it's a bigger problem. Let's take a minute here though to talk about the second question I think it's

interesting because we know that one of the things that puts a person at greater risk for being an alcohol abuser is having parents that were. But in my mind I guess there's some question about well what really is that. Are we talking about something that's a genetic predisposition or are we talking about a behavior that is learned. Well that's a big question. And. And I think that that most scientists feel that there is a genetic component that people that for instance one scientist I interviewed who the head of the committee on the genetics of alcoholism a major research program said that he estimated that about 50 percent of people who are alcoholics were John that are genetically predisposed. But what does that mean to be genetically predisposed it doesn't mean that you're fated to become alcoholic that you have to be in fact we don't really know what it means. There are a lot of theories out there and maybe I can just give you a couple of the more prominent

theories of what it means to be or how people might be genetically predisposed. Probably the most prominent theory has to do with predisposition to impulsivity. There's something wrong with a part of the brain that inhibits action when you should inhibit it. So people who are predisposed to behave impulsively. Are also predisposed to become alcoholic. It's not specific to alcoholism. You're also predisposed to any kind of addiction to a DD to depression and anxiety to all sorts of disorders. So that's one way that people could be predisposed to alcoholism. Really what it is is a kind of hyper excitability of the central nervous system and alcohol calms it. So again David it's back to this question of self medication. Another model is that people who are predisposed to alcoholism are less susceptible to alcohol effects.

They feel them less. So it takes more alcohol to feel a little bit high to accomplish the same thing of someone else. And so you know the man or woman who can really hold her liquor might actually be more apt to become alcohol dependent because she has to drink more to feel the same effect. And then there's another model which is in some ways the reverse of what I've just said that that you might be really susceptible to the positive effects of alcohol you feel really good when you drink and happy and the next day you don't have any problem getting up and going off to work are sitting down at your typewriter or whatever it is you're doing because you're not as susceptible to the negative effects the hangovers. So as you can see in all of these examples it's not that you have to become alcoholic as an indirect influence that makes you more likely to become alcoholic. I don't want to underestimate the importance of a family history because people who have a lot of

alcoholics in their families and their extended families may well you know really be predisposed and should really be very very attentive to their drinking and perhaps choose not to drink at all because there's no question that that family influences that family history whether as you say it's behavioral or whether it's all you know genetic in some ways it doesn't matter you're more you're more apt to become alcoholic and you need to be careful. We're getting really short on time I appreciate the questions that the caller asked. I have one more person I want to try to get in here. You know Bana this is line two. Hello yes. Did you address this before. What is the allergy between alcoholism and a medication such as Prozac for depression. Are they incompatible. You should not be drinking alcohol if you're on Prozac. I'm not a doctor and I don't want to pretend to be. But I do know that you shouldn't be

drinking if it's true first of all if you're prone to depression alcohol is is it makes depression worse. Of course. Right. So some met many medications are very dangerous to take in combination with alcohol. No one really has to have a doctor's care facilities. You need to talk to your doctor about Russian medications. OK. Thank you so much. Ron thanks. Even aspirin can interact with the rest of medicine can interact with alcohol so it's really good question for anyone to ask their doctor. Bored bored thing any time you get prescription medication. That's one of the things probably you should avoid but if you're not sure ask the doctor ask the pharmacist when you get the medicine. We're coming down here to a couple of minutes left. No one thing that we really haven't talked very much about is his treatment and in. Unfortunately it's probably not really enough time for you to do that but maybe you could say at least a few things. We talked about the fact that a treat because again going back to this idea that we have that alcoholics are mostly men. The treatment really is skewed sort of towards men and

what will work with them. And one thing that you said was that that some women find it more beneficial to be involved in groups that are all women. Are there some other things that you could say about what sort of treatment seems to be most useful for women. Well in the time of time we have left I suppose what I would emphasize that if a woman is going for treatment she should ask you know what kind of special programming do you have for women. What do you have all women's groups if you've been sexually abused. Is there good treatment for that as well. If you're depressed is there good treatment for that as well. If you have children you know what about issues to do with the children will someone be helping you with those of us domestic abuse. I'm just making sure that there are women's programs at the at the treatment center where you're going. There are across the country a few places that will take women with their children. And interestingly these have a really high success rate. Many women do very well

when they can bring the children into treatment with them. It's there. We're still working there's really a long way to go in terms of really tailoring treatment to women's problems. But there are some places that are more sensitive than others and it's a really good idea to ask and I think one of the things that struck me as particularly interesting you know some many people have been held by Alcoholics Anonymous and and certainly some women have been but I was really struck by the comment in the book that some women when they come to a find trouble with the very first step which is the thing that says I give up control and that many of these of these women would already say look I feel like I don't have control now. Are you telling me now that I have to give up control Yeah that's going to work real well for me. Yeah I just sort of again one of those things that suggests that women's experiences differ from men's experience and. And from from the get go you've got to take a different approach.

That's right. That's right. It's in many ways it's a question of emphasis but for a woman to say I'm powerless as you say sometimes the frogs are still children so so what's now I have been all my life and for her the real revelation is that she can actually take control that she cannot have her drinking she's not going to able to control her drinking if she's dependent on alcohol. But to find out that she can take control of her life is far more revelent Torii for her. Well we're at the point where we're going to have to finish there's there's a there's a lot in this book that we haven't touched on so I certainly would recommend it to anyone who is interested in reading more on this issue. The title is happy hours alcohol in a woman's life by divine yourselves. And if you look at the book her first name DTV and kind of like it sounds her last name g e r s l d. And again books published by Cliff Street division of Harper Collins and Mr seld Thanks thanks very much for talking with us today. Thank you David it's a pleasure.