The A-Files, Alcohol A-Z for Alcohol Awareness Month: Underage Drinking

(online video and article)

Twenty-six episodes of 'The A-Files' air throughout Alcohol Awareness Month on YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Alcohologist.com and AddictedMinds.com, among other web and social media sites. Episode U looks at underage drinking. Impaired driving crashes are the leading cause of alcohol-related deaths among teens, but it is not the only underage drinking concern. Nearly two-thirds of deaths due to underage drinking are not related to intoxicated driving, according to data analysis MADD compiled. Thirty percent of alcohol-related deaths in people age 15 to 20 are from homicides.

Fourteen percent are from suicides. Nine percent are from alcohol overdose. Other causes, such as drowning and household accidents, comprise the remaining 15 percent.
The group's blog also notes, “Compared with non-drinking classmates, teens who drink are more likely get pregnant, fail in school, become sexually assaulted or take their own lives.” They also point to teen alcohol use as an indicator for alcohol use disorders later in life. The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse andAlcoholism reports that teens who start drinking before age 15 are four times more likely to develop an alcohol addiction.

The European model of letting teens experiment with drinking at home – with meals or socially – doesn’t stand up to its alleged benefits of educating them about responsible use. Research from Australia’s National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre (NDARC) studied 2000 families over four years and proved it doesn't work. Ian Hickie from the University of Sydney’s says "In fact, it's the opposite, you've probably increased the chance that they'll drink irresponsibly in another place. It normalizes the behavior of drinking a toxin and known carcinogen, in addition to injuring a developing brain.

The health consequence is the most severe and overlooked part of the equation. According to the Federal Trade Commission, teens don't just drink; they drink excessively. More than one in eight sophomores and one in four seniors report binge drinking. A report from the Surgeon General notes that since the brain continues to develop into a person's mid- 20's, frequent binge drinking can have long-lasting effects on intellectual abilities. The brain’s frontal lobes are among the final pieces of the brain to fully develop in our 20's. They are important for planning, forming ideas, making decisions, and using self-control. When alcohol damage the frontal lobes of the brain, it is permanent. It's like luggage, you're stuck with it forever.

The entire 26 episode HD series is available on disc, along with fact sheets, for helping professions. See the preorder special at tr.im/AFiles


Visit alcohologist.com for a replay of CBS Sports' Power Up Your Health featuring Scott Stevens.  Another interview is on Alcohol Awareness.  Syndicated radio program Savvy Central Radio did this interview, too. Lucy Pireel's "All That's Written" included a feature called "When alcohol doesn't work for you anymore."  Details on the third literary award for Every Silver Lining Has a Cloud and the first for Adding Fire to the Fuel also can be found on www.alcohologist.com. Download the FREE Alcohology app in the Google PlayStore today. Stevens also is the public relations officer with AddictedMinds.com 

Gender study links alcohol, gender, insomnia and suicide

The Sobriety :60+ episode 44: Previous episodes of The Sobriety :60+ have covered sleep and alcohol, alcohol and suicide, and the ways genders handle alcohol differently. Those are episodes 19, 15 and 42 if you're YouTubing. A new study shows how the three topics converge. Read the transcript 

or share the YouTube vid.

Visit alcohologist.com for a replay of CBS Sports' Power Up Your Health featuring Scott Stevens.  Host Ed Forteau led a discussion on the health risks and myths of health benefits of drinking.  Lucy Pireel's "All That's Written" included a feature on Every Silver Lining Has a Cloud called "When alcohol doesn't work for you anymore."  Details on the third literary award for Every Silver Lining Has a Cloud also can be found on www.alcohologist.com, plus an interview with Christoph Fisher Books.  Mr. Fisher is an acclaimed international author from the UK, among his works is the Alzheimer's book "Time to Let Go."  Download the FREE Alcohology app in the Google PlayStore today.

The Sobriety :60 #18 - The deception of holiday cheer

Holiday blues aren't a reason to self-medicate, they're a reason NOT to.  The new episode of The Sobriety :60 examines alcohol as a mood amplifier.  Watch it on youtube or read the transcript.

Visit alcohologist.com for a replay of the Dr. Alan Simberg's show, Life Changing Insights, featuring Scott Stevens.  Dr. Simberg led a discussion on the health risks and myths of health benefits of drinking.  Lucy Pireel's "All That's Written" included a feature on Every Silver Lining Has a Cloud called "When alcohol doesn't work for you anymore."  Details on the third literary award for Every Silver Lining Has a Cloud also can be found on www.alcohologist.com, plus an interview with Christoph Fisher Books.  Mr. Fisher is an acclaimed international author from the UK, among his works is the Alzheimer's book "Time to Let Go."  

The Sobriety :60 - Depression & Suicide

Alcohol causes depression rather than alleviating it... plus the tragic intersections of alcohol, depression and taking one's own life. The transcript of episode #15 of The Sobriety :60 is at http://www.examiner.com/article/the-sobriety-60-spotlights-alcohol-depression-and-suicide and the video is on YouTube http://youtu.be/1NLTnlt20Ow

Visit alcohologist.com for a replay of the Bringing Inspiration To Earth show feature with Scott Stevens. Lucy Pireel's "All That's Written" included a feature on Every Silver Lining Has a Cloud called "When alcohol doesn't work for you anymore."  Details on the third literary award for Every Silver Lining Has a Cloud also can be found on www.alcohologist.com, plus an interview with Scott Stevens on Health Media Now and one at Christoph Fisher Books.  Mr. Fisher is an acclaimed international author from the UK, among his works is the Alzheimer's book "Time to Let Go."  

SUNDAY SNIPPET: October 20

This Every Silver Lining Has a Cloud excerpt looks a group therapy approach that sometimes is employed with alcohol abusers with success, but may be counterproductive in treating Alcoholism.

"Watch out for group therapy that emphasizes a “hot seat” approach: Break-them-down confrontational techniques have not been proven clinically. Sometimes the public view of the Alcoholic person only as a fun-loving, thrill-seeking, irresponsible and childish person who is into the immediate gratification of every impulse is interpreted in group-therapy circles are a need to punish it out of him. Humiliate him. Teach him a lesson. That’s where this obnoxious hot-seat idea originated. However, the self-willed jerk just described is the alcohol abuser, not the Alcoholic. Behavioral approaches can work for alcohol abusers because lapse, in their world, is based on how they want to behave, not how they are feeling. For Alcoholics, it is a different matter. For Alcoholics, “Cognitive [Behavioral] treatment is not adequate for recovery,” says Wilson-Schaef. “To deal only with the analytical, rational and logical is to perpetuate the disease.”

No one can knock Behavioral Therapy in general because it works very well for a lot of behavioral problems, like alcohol abuse, overeating or kleptomania. No one can knock its founder, Albert Ellis: Only the Gideons and the phone company have their names on more books. Ellis is to psychology what Lawrence Tribe is to law. But Alcoholism is not a behavior.

When you hear Behavioral Therapy in conjunction with group therapy, think of conditioning, like B.F. Skinner’s strategies training pigeons or Ivan Pavlov’s dogs trained to drool at the sound of a dinner bell. Behavioral Therapy uses the theory on people. (Here’s a funny thought to ponder: Did Pavlov condition his dogs? Or did the dogs condition Pavlov to feed them?) There is no room for emotion. “This myopia,” says William Lewis, “May stem from a standpoint which originated in a laboratory where experimental animals were to be manipulated, not loved.” (“Why People Change,” in The Psychology of Influence, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., New York 1972)
--  Every Silver Lining Has a Cloud: Relapse and the Symptoms of Sobriety, pgs. 100-101



Also, please check out the author interview with Scott Stevens on "All That's Written" 10/11/13
www.alcohologist.com

SATURDAY REWIND: Increase in suicide rates, alcohol misuse, depression

Two articles from the alcohol research news archive, published three months apart, demonstrate the complex and deadly interplay between alcohol, depression and suicide.  It's sometimes referred to as a "squirrel cage" in which people use alcohol, a depressant, to treat depression...the alcohol causes more depression... which the person self-medicates with more alcohol.


The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) showed that while suicide rates rose slowly between 1999 and 2007, the rate of increase more than quadrupled from 2008 to 2010. A link between depression and economic recession is assumed in a letter doctors from Britain, Hong Kong and the U.S. wrote on the new data to the medical journal Lancet Nov. 7.

There were 1,500 more reported suicides since 2007 than could have been expected using the suicide rate for the previous eight years. About 25 percent of the increase is attributable to the unemployment rate according to the lead doctor in the Lancet letter.

Alcohol use disorders, either alcohol abuse or the disease of alcoholism, are risk factors for suicide across all demographic divisions. According to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, 96 percent of alcoholics who die by suicide continue their drinking right up to the end of their lives.

Alcoholism is a factor in about 30 percent of all completed suicides. Approximately seven percent of those with alcoholism will take their own lives. Alcohol use when accompanied by other disorders, like depression, is one of the AFSP’s top-cited risk factors. Alcoholics, especially those with untreated alcoholism, usually fall into this last group because alcoholics use the depressant alcohol to treat their depression.
-- from examiner.com (see full article)

Bouts of depression are often the direct result of alcohol intake, according to a study in the March issue of the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs. The researchers linked alcohol abuse and the disease of alcoholism to a third of depressive episodes. These periods of depression are different than depressive episodes caused by other life events.

Experts have long known that heavy drinking can spur temporary episodes of depression while many with alcohol use disorders use alcohol to relieve depression. They self-medicate. "I don't know that the average person realizes that heavy drinking can induce mood problems," said lead researcher Marc A. Schuckit, M.D., of the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine.

Not every doctor might be aware of it, either. But it's important that he or she pay close attention to this problem, Schuckit said, because depression caused by heavy drinking has a different prognosis and is treated much differently from depression not tied to drinking. “Although the symptoms of independent and substance-induced depressions can be identical, if the sadness develops in the context of heavy drinking, the symptoms are likely to lift within several weeks to a month of abstinence and rarely require antidepressants to go away.

“It's important for doctors to consider alcohol use disorders as a possible cause of patients' depression symptoms,” Schuckit said—rather than simply "reaching for the prescription pad" and recommending an antidepressant." The patient needs to be forthcoming with information about alcohol use in order for the physician to properly diagnose the source of the depression.

The 30-year study evaluated nearly 400 men who were 18 years old at the outset. About half were at increased risk for drinking problems because their fathers were alcoholics. Over three decades, about 41 percent of the men with alcoholic fathers developed alcohol abuse or alcoholism, and nearly 20 percent suffered at least one bout of major depression. For men with alcohol problems, though, almost one third of those major depressive episodes were seen only while they were drinking heavily, not depression caused by other life events.

If alcohol is the cause, according to the journal, the depression is very likely to disappear with abstinence.
--from examiner.com (see full article)
www.alcohologist.com

Scroll down for the replay of the Dr. Jeanette Gallagher show feature with Scott Stevens. Lucy Pireel's "All That's Written" included a feature on Every Silver Lining Has a Cloud called "When alcohol doesn't work for you anymore."  Details on the third literary award for Every Silver Lining Has a Cloud can be found on www.alcohologist.com, plus the interview with Scott Stevens at Christoph Fisher Books.  Mr. Fisher is an acclaimed international historical fiction novelist from the UK.  
 

SAVE THE DATE:  Scott Stevens will be part of the opening night symposium for the REEL Recovery Film Festival San Francisco.

SUNDAY SNIPPET: October 13

As a friendly heads-up, the paperback version of Every Silver Lining Has a Cloud: Relapse and the Symptoms of Sobriety is now discounted on amazon.  The price is $14.89 USD, $5.10 off the cover price. Not sure if other retailers will follow suit.

After posting a mock-up of the cover for my 2014 work in progress on the Every Silver Lining Has a Cloud Facebook page, I had a few people ask what it's about.  Adding Fire to the Fuel is on the stigma society clips on the word and the diagnosis of Alcoholism.  Here is an excerpt from Adding Fire to the Fuel: The Stigma of Alcoholism -- likely the only snippet from the forthcoming book posted until fall 2014.


“When they begin casting for “Real Housewives of Phoenix,” no doubt Trish would make the short list of any TV producer. The former Indiana University cheerleader still had her college figure in her early 40’s, even after two children. The planes of her face, the delicate nose and well-chiseled cheekbones spoke of a decade and a half of modeling work. Her blue eyes were flecked with gold. And she had freckles – even they had sexiness about them.

She was blonde and bold, both came from bottles: Clairol and Jim Beam respectively.

The stormy marriage and two trips to rehab (where I met her) only sweeten what the sweet Midwesterner brings to her gossipy neighborhood and the intrigue-hungry reality show. She’s a dream. Her job’s a dream. Her kids are a dream. Her home, all 3,500 square feet of stucco in the desert, is a dream.

The Mercedes is parked under the beams of the carport. A hummingbird feeder dangled from one end of a crossbeam. Trish, on that October morning, dangled from the other end by her graceful neck. That’s how the police found her. Here’s the story of how she got there.

 

She died sober.  This was only her tragically extreme, unnecessary and self-serving answer to the tragically extreme, unnecessary and self-serving stigma she faced as a result of being a not-so-anonymous alcoholic. Neither Trish's suicide nor the societal stigma is acceptable."

 

www.alcohologist.com

SATURDAY REWIND: Nicotine vs. Alcohol, which one is worse?

This story from the alcohol research news archive demonstrates that while neither smoking or drinking are good health choices, there's a body of evidence that says alcohol is responsible for more harm than smoking. 

When a person recognizes there’s a problem with his or her drinking, quitting or cutting back can be as life-changing as pledges to work out more or promises to get a new job. Here are additional considerations about alcohol use disorders, quitting and staying sober.

Alcohol is a mass killer in the United States and is the defining public health issue for the 21st century. Driving under the influence has statistically little to do with those conclusions. Just under 10,000 motor vehicle deaths, 40 percent of the total, stem from alcohol-related crashes. To put that into context with other preventable deaths:
157,000 lung cancer deaths annually
50,000 people are killed in gun violence
39,520 breast cancer deaths
37,000 fatal overdoses from prescription drugs
34,000 suicides
30,000 Americans still die of the flu
18,000 people are killed in our hospitals by staph infections

Every alcohol-related car crash death is heartbreaking, but by the numbers, those deaths make up very little of the death toll from alcohol use. Even if you ended drinking and driving, alcohol is still our nation’s number one killer:
89,000 other deaths (not in cars) are directly attributed to alcohol; and,
1,000,000 more fatalities from diseases are indirectly attributed to alcohol (e.g. alcohol causes a condition leading to death).

It’s easy to be offended by drinking and driving. What’s even more offensive is the underreporting of the health effects of alcohol that prove alcohol is our defining health issue. Tobacco has at times held that mantle, but by comparison, only 473,000 die annually of smoking-related illness. Beverage alcohol kills more than a million. A 2012 study by the German University Medicine Greifswald found that heavy drinkers are at more risk of death than those who smoke.

The way America has responded to tobacco awareness campaigns holds promise for alcohol awareness campaigns, should one be mounted. In 1967, smoking was “in.” Seventy-six percent of adult men smoked. Today smoking is “out” and health officials at the Food and Drug Administration believe by 2020 smoking will be banned in all states. This is happening within just a generation and a half because smoking’s health effects are no longer underreported or reported only in obscure medical publications. With alcohol, as with smoking, people are entitled to their own opinions, but they are not entitled to their own facts.
-- Entire story appears on examiner.com

As a side note on a possible smoking/drinking link, a study from Baylor this summer found that smoking can increase the likelihood of a person becoming an alcohol abuser. Researchers discovered that even a small amount of nicotine can increase the likelihood because nicotine is powerful enough to change how the brain perceives alcohol as a reward it craves.
www.alcohologist.com

SUNDAY SNIPPET August 25

Former boxing champ Mike Tyson's admission that he's struggled with grief and forgiveness in part of his ongoing alcohol rehab points to two of the four key stressors Every Silver Lining Has a Cloud notes as potential barriers to long-term sobriety. Of course everyone, Alcoholic or non-Alcoholic, faces these stressors.  Most handle it swimmingly well, others not so well, masking them with alcohol.  When someone with the disease of Alcoholism encounters something so strong it triggers the stress hormone cortisol, relapse is a possibility.

 

"For those on the outside of the disease, in a way, dealing with a drinking Alcoholic is easier than dealing with a sober one because with a drinking one you know what the problem is. The conversations I had with more than 200 men and women in recovery reveal what the sober Alcoholic’s problems are.

 

When the Symptoms of Sobriety appear, know they are normal responses to cortisol increase traced to these four things we struggle with in sobriety:

Guilt (Chapter Four)

Shame (Chapter Five)

Forgiveness (Chapter Six)

Grief (Chapter Seven)

 

When you take away alcohol, you still have problems—problems that non-Alcoholics sometimes use alcohol to relieve, “treat” or cover up. In an Alcoholic, these four cause relapse. They are the cloud to sobriety’s silver lining. They aren’t simply squishy, intangible emotional qualities for Hallmark cards or spiritual books. Science shows they’re states that have a concrete and measurable effect on our biochemistry.

 

Every Alcoholic has manifestations of these four and needs treatment geared toward these stressors or the treatment fails. No treatment will have lasting success without addressing what causes the Symptoms of Sobriety. To put it another way, it’s well known that high cholesterol levels increase coronary heart disease—heart trouble. Those who have a genetic predisposition for difficulty handling cholesterol frequently can forestall heart trouble with careful eating habits. A person who doesn’t have the problem handling cholesterol doesn’t have the same urgent need to restrict his diet. Eating ice cream or gorging on fries isn’t much of an issue for him but it is for the man who does have the genetic predisposition. And so it goes with Alcoholics who are stuck with a problem handling cortisol. Guilt, shame, forgiveness and grief are a threat to recovery trouble like cholesterol is a threat to heart trouble."

--from Every Silver Lining Has a Cloud: Relapse and the Symptoms of Sobriety, pgs. 33-34

www.alcohologist.com

SATURDAY REWIND: Intoxicated driving no longer top killer of teen drivers, but being #2 is no merit badge

The no-kidding news this week was that texting behind the wheel is a bigger killer of teen drivers than drinking and driving. Teens killed texting and driving: 3,000. Teens killed drinking and driving: 2,700. A number of high-profile programs are aimed at avoiding crashes by stifling the distraction of the mobile phone. AT&T. AAA. The AdCouncil. All have top-of-mind messages about the texting-and-driving danger. Just because drinking and driving has slipped to the number two slot in the lethal list, does not mean it has become less hazardous... it just means more teens are tapping out messages instead of paying attention to the road.

 

Parents, schools and community leaders are mindful to not take the emphasis off the hazards of intoxicated driving just because a new killer has risen to the top of the list. But as the following article from my news archive points out, schools and communities have less of a role than parents in thwarting drinking and driving and underage drinking in general.

Parental involvement does more to discourage underage drinking than the school environment can, according to research released December 4 by three universities.

Specifically, the researchers looked at how “family social capital” and “school social capital” changed the chances for and/or frequency of alcohol use by children. Family social capital can be described as the bonds between parents and children, such as trust, open lines of communication and active engagement in a child’s life. School social capital captures a school’s ability to serve as a positive environment for learning, including measures such as student involvement in extracurricular activities, teacher morale and the ability of teachers to address the needs of individual students. Parenting is a better block to underage drinking than the schools, according to the North Carolina State University news release on the study.

"To be clear, school programs that address alcohol and marijuana use are definitely valuable, but the bonds parents form with their children are more important. Ideally, we can have both," says Dr. Toby Parcel, a professor of sociology at NC State and co-author of a paper on the work.

The researchers looked at data from a nationally representative sample that collected information from more than 10,000 students, as well as their parents, teachers and school administrators. The research, to be included in the quarterly Journal of Drug Issues, evaluated marijuana use and alcohol use separately.

“Parents play an important role in shaping the decisions their children make when it comes to alcohol and marijuana,” says Parcel. In both cases, researchers at NCSU (in conjunction with Brigham Young University and Penn State University) found that students with high levels of family social capital and low levels of school social capital were less likely to have used marijuana or alcohol – or to have used those substances less frequently – than students with high levels of school social capital but low family social capital.

More than 10 million American youth under the age of 21 drink alcohol, and more than a million of them are binge drinkers, according to the American Medical Association. One in four teens in the United States have consumed alcohol in the past 30 days. "Underage drinking should not be a normal part of growing up. It's a serious and persistent public health problem that puts our young people and our communities in danger," said U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) Administrator Pamela S. Hyde in a related November 26 examiner.com story. "Even though drinking is often glamorized, the truth is that underage drinking can lead to poor academic performance, sexual assault, injury, and even death." Teen drinking also can lead to alcohol abuse as an adult or the disease of alcoholism.
– from examiner.com


The news headlines this week to dangers specific to teens behind the wheel, whether texting or drinking. The above article begins to address the life risks stemming from underage drinking aside from traffic accidents. Earlier this year, a Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) commissioned study (see related article) concluded that two-thirds of alcohol-related underage drinking deaths were not from traffic accidents. Thirty percent of alcohol-related deaths in people age 15 to 20 are from homicides. Fourteen percent are from suicides. Nine percent are from alcohol overdose. Other causes, such as drowning and household accidents, comprise the remaining 15 percent.

Texting and driving might be the trending topic today, but as MADD points out, “Of all the dangers teens face, underage drinking is among the worst.” And it's not just behind the wheel.
www.alcohologist.com