2nd part to the post above!...
http://204.147.80.67/~brecovery/
Is There an Alcoholic Personality?
One of the most persistent myths about alcoholism is that it stems from some sort of personality disorder. Dr. George Vaillant, an eminent Harvard psychiatrist, has spent forty years trying to determine if there is any truth to this popular conception. His team of psychologists and sociologists has studied more than 650 young men in hopes of finding traits that predict alcoholism. In a 1984 report on his long-term study, Vaillant concluded that there is no evidence to support the belief that personality disorders predispose a person to alcoholism:
Future alcoholics do NOT appear different from future asymptomatic drinkers in terms of premorbid psychological stability. It is the heavy use of alcohol that causes personality alternations.
Even sociopathic behavior is almost always a consequence, not a cause of alcohol abuse.
Just as light passing through water confounds our perceptions, the illness of alcoholism profoundly distorts the individual's personality.
For a better understanding of Dr. Vaillant's conclusions, let's take a look at one of his subjects, James O'Neill, chosen for the study at age nineteen. This case study is taken from Dr. Vaillant's book The Natural History of Alcoholism.
Vaillant's study group was composed of college sophomores chosen on the basis of their psychological health. At the time, in the forties, the dean's office rated O'Neill's stability as "A" and ranked him in the top third of the study group. The project psychiatrist described O'Neill's parents as "reliable, consistent, obsessive and devoted." O'Neill's relationship with his mother was rated among the best in the study. In 1950, six months after his mother died, O'Neill still felt the loss deeply.
When he was twenty-one, O'Neill married his high school girl-friend, whom he had been in love with since age sixteen. Six years later the marriage still seemed solid.
O'Neill had begun drinking heavily in 1948, and by 1950 he had begun drinking in the morning. He admitted that between 1952 and 1955 he had written his Ph.D. dissertation while continuously intoxicated and had regularly sold books from the university library in order to support his drinking. By 1955, his alcoholism was campus gossip; by 1957, O'Neill recognized that his pattern of drinking, sexual infidelity, gambling, and unrepaid borrowing suggested a psychopathic personality. In discussions with a psychologist in the 1960s, O'Neill voiced no sorrow about his mother's death and could not even remember when she had died. Later, a psychiatrist observed that O'Neill "felt quite hostile and anxious about the fact that he was an army brat and never had a normal childhood, and his parents were always very cold toward him. He harbored many feelings of hostility toward his wife."
In 1970, when he was fifty-two, O'Neill stopped drinking and joined AA. Two years later he described himself to a project psychiatrist as "a classic psychopath totally incapable of commitment to any man alive. I'm hyperemotional. In AA, I'm known as Dr. Anti-Serenity."
What happened to this promising, psychologically stable young man?
There is no doubt that his brain no longer served him normally. His thinking had become negative. He felt isolated and hyperactive. A reasonable explanation for his personality changes is that heavy alcohol use gradually disrupted his normal brain function by blocking or destroying the natural chemicals that maintain emotional stability. This kind of chemical disruption cannot be talked away by therapy.
Your Alcoholic Brain: The Malfunctioning Computer
Recent discoveries about the workings of the brain have shed important new light on the role a wide variety of natural chemicals play in maintaining normal thought patterns, feelings, self-awareness, memory, and perception. There is also an enormous body of research to show that alcohol diminishes or destroys many of the substances the brain must use to create and regulate our emotions. The human mind cannot operate in a vacuum. It depends on the molecular functioning of the brain to maintain mental processes and emotional health.
For the parents, husbands, wives, and friends of an alcoholic, there is some comfort in knowing that the personality changes they have observed are a result of alterations in normal brain chemistry caused by heavy drinking. It is no more logical to blame the alcoholic for altered behavior than to demand accountability from someone with Alzheimer's disease. They don't choose to behave as they do. They are ill, victims of chemical changes they cannot control.
My search for an explanation for my son's suicide finally ended when I came to understand how alcohol had affected his brain, altered his personality, and turned him into a suicidal depressed young man.
But this understanding gave rise to more questions. What could be done to prevent similar tragedies? Is there no way to undo the damage alcohol causes?
As I pondered these questions, I began to wonder about the value of the conventional approach to the treatment of alcoholism. For all the spiritual resources provided by AA and the psychological insights available in counseling and group therapy, no attempts were being made to undo the damaging effects of alcohol on the delicate chemical balance that keeps the brain and central nervous system functioning normally. Why weren't we trying to fix what alcohol had broken?
Was I overlooking something? Surely others had asked the same questions that nagged at me. George Vaillant had brilliantly and conclusively demonstrated that the alcoholic's unstable behavior is a consequence, not a cause, of alcoholism and that personality changes stem from the physical damage done by this disease. Was there no treatment to repair that damage?
Back to the Drawing Board
In 1896 Sigmund Freud predicted that "the future may teach us to exercise a direct influence by means of chemical substances upon the amounts of energy and their distribution in the apparatus of the mind." By 1927 he had become "firmly convinced that one day all these mental disturbances we are trying to understand will be treated by means of hormones or similar substances."
Today, we see how right he was. We now have drugs to treat depression, the schizophrenias, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. And lying unused in libraries everywhere are reports on studies of the destructive effect of alcohol on the mind and body through its power to inhibit access to key amino acids, vitamins, minerals, trace elements, enzymes, hormones, and essential fatty acids-the natural chemicals that support life and sustain sanity.
My question was whether it would be possible to restore depleted or damaged natural chemicals. If it was, I theorized, recovery from alcoholism might be more successful than it was with current treatment.
Nobel Prize laureate Linus Pauling coined the word "orthomolecular" to describe the process of "establishing the right molecules in the body by varying the concentrations of substances normally present and required for optimum health." Could orthomolecular treatment be the answer I sought? At the time I had been working as a chemical-dependency counselor for five years and was weary of seeing people discharged when they were still depressed and ill. My peers didn't see what I was getting at. Small wonder, their training hadn't included the study of the physical basis of psychological problems.
But the clients understood. They were painfully aware that therapy had failed to eliminate their cravings, anxiety, insomnia, depression, and mental confusion. I finally decided to test my theories to see what would happen by combining biochemical repair with traditional treatment for alcoholism. In January 1981, I established the Health Recovery Center as a pilot program offering physical detoxification and biochemical repair along with counseling and participation in Alcoholics Anonymous.
We focused on the internal symptoms as well as the obvious external calamities that brought our clients to treatment. We knew they could put their calamities behind them, but it would take more than talk to relieve the agony emanating from their chemically disrupted brains.
Biochemical Repair
Our biochemical repair program is built around two premises
1.Addressing the substances that must be kept out of the alcoholic's body (including alcohol and other drugs, such as nicotine, caffeine, and refined sugars)
2.Addressing the substances that must be restored to the brain and body (chemicals depleted by alcohol.)
We begin with a physical exam and laboratory testing to identify where damage has occurred. Clients are also screened for vulnerability to substances that can cause cravings for alcohol
At the outset we explain why it's so important that clients avoid caffeine, nicotine, and refined sugars in addition to alcohol. We were amazed at how much coffee our clients had been drinking; some were up to forty cups a day. Caffeine is a drug. Although it recently received a clean bill of health for those concerned about heart disease and cancer, it can complicate or retard recovery from alcohol. Caffeine pumps a lot of adrenaline into the bloodstream. This temporarily provides energy-the morning lift so many people get from their first cup of coffee. Adrenaline also dumps stored glycogen (sugar) into the bloodstream, which triggers an outpouring of insulin. This caffeine-triggered rush of sugar and insulin is no help for alcoholics attempting to stabilize their glucose metabolism.
Foods containing refined sugars are also off-limits because they intensify hypoglycemic symptoms (often described as "dry-drunk" behaviors).
Smoking and using snuff or chewing tobacco is bad for everyone, but many alcoholics already have a lower than normal resistance to disease and do not need any more health hazards than they have already accumulated.
Few treatment programs require clients to avoid these substances on the theory that patients should not have to give up anything more than alcohol. It is a sympathetic attitude we don't think our clients can afford.
From the start, our treatment results were dramatic. Even clients who had failed to recover repeatedly in the past did very well. After two years, we knew we were on the right track. Most clients recovered both their sobriety and their health. The time had come to collect scientific data to confirm (or disprove) what we thought was happening. The research became the basis of my Ph.D. dissertation. I collected data on one hundred alcoholic clients chosen at random. Each was followed for up to three and a half years after treatment. Briefly, this is what I found:
Ninety-eight percent had either an alcoholic parent or close relative. (The other two were adopted, so their genetic heritage was unknown.)
There were ninety-eight previous treatment experiences among the one hundred patients (some had been treated more than once; others, not at all). Of those previously treated, more than half had relapsed by the third month following their last treatment
After one year, only 24 percent had remained sober.
Of the one hundred clients, eighty-eight had abnormal glucose metabolism (hypoglycemia or diabetes).
Many were deficient in a number of essential nutrients.
Seventy-three percent tested positive for allergies to various foods; the most common allergies were to wheat and dairy products.
Fifty-five percent were sensitive to some environmental chemical, principally to products containing hydrocarbons, including ethanols and gasoline.
Twenty-five percent suffered from candida-related complex, a condition stemming from an over colonization of opportunistic yeast, Candida albicans, in the body. CRC can underlie depression, acute fatigue, indigestion, migraine headaches vaginal and sinus infections, premenstrual syndrome, and impaired immune system functioning. Alcoholics are particularly susceptible because their high intake of sugar (in the form of alcohol) provides a receptive environment for the growth of these intestinal fungi. Poor nutrition can also set the stage far CRC, as can frequent use of antibiotics to treat the infections to which alcoholics in poor health are prone (antibiotics can upset the natural balance of protective bacteria in the intestinal tract that holds Candida albicans in check).
http://204.147.80.67/~brecovery/
Is There an Alcoholic Personality?
One of the most persistent myths about alcoholism is that it stems from some sort of personality disorder. Dr. George Vaillant, an eminent Harvard psychiatrist, has spent forty years trying to determine if there is any truth to this popular conception. His team of psychologists and sociologists has studied more than 650 young men in hopes of finding traits that predict alcoholism. In a 1984 report on his long-term study, Vaillant concluded that there is no evidence to support the belief that personality disorders predispose a person to alcoholism:
Future alcoholics do NOT appear different from future asymptomatic drinkers in terms of premorbid psychological stability. It is the heavy use of alcohol that causes personality alternations.
Even sociopathic behavior is almost always a consequence, not a cause of alcohol abuse.
Just as light passing through water confounds our perceptions, the illness of alcoholism profoundly distorts the individual's personality.
For a better understanding of Dr. Vaillant's conclusions, let's take a look at one of his subjects, James O'Neill, chosen for the study at age nineteen. This case study is taken from Dr. Vaillant's book The Natural History of Alcoholism.
Vaillant's study group was composed of college sophomores chosen on the basis of their psychological health. At the time, in the forties, the dean's office rated O'Neill's stability as "A" and ranked him in the top third of the study group. The project psychiatrist described O'Neill's parents as "reliable, consistent, obsessive and devoted." O'Neill's relationship with his mother was rated among the best in the study. In 1950, six months after his mother died, O'Neill still felt the loss deeply.
When he was twenty-one, O'Neill married his high school girl-friend, whom he had been in love with since age sixteen. Six years later the marriage still seemed solid.
O'Neill had begun drinking heavily in 1948, and by 1950 he had begun drinking in the morning. He admitted that between 1952 and 1955 he had written his Ph.D. dissertation while continuously intoxicated and had regularly sold books from the university library in order to support his drinking. By 1955, his alcoholism was campus gossip; by 1957, O'Neill recognized that his pattern of drinking, sexual infidelity, gambling, and unrepaid borrowing suggested a psychopathic personality. In discussions with a psychologist in the 1960s, O'Neill voiced no sorrow about his mother's death and could not even remember when she had died. Later, a psychiatrist observed that O'Neill "felt quite hostile and anxious about the fact that he was an army brat and never had a normal childhood, and his parents were always very cold toward him. He harbored many feelings of hostility toward his wife."
In 1970, when he was fifty-two, O'Neill stopped drinking and joined AA. Two years later he described himself to a project psychiatrist as "a classic psychopath totally incapable of commitment to any man alive. I'm hyperemotional. In AA, I'm known as Dr. Anti-Serenity."
What happened to this promising, psychologically stable young man?
There is no doubt that his brain no longer served him normally. His thinking had become negative. He felt isolated and hyperactive. A reasonable explanation for his personality changes is that heavy alcohol use gradually disrupted his normal brain function by blocking or destroying the natural chemicals that maintain emotional stability. This kind of chemical disruption cannot be talked away by therapy.
Your Alcoholic Brain: The Malfunctioning Computer
Recent discoveries about the workings of the brain have shed important new light on the role a wide variety of natural chemicals play in maintaining normal thought patterns, feelings, self-awareness, memory, and perception. There is also an enormous body of research to show that alcohol diminishes or destroys many of the substances the brain must use to create and regulate our emotions. The human mind cannot operate in a vacuum. It depends on the molecular functioning of the brain to maintain mental processes and emotional health.
For the parents, husbands, wives, and friends of an alcoholic, there is some comfort in knowing that the personality changes they have observed are a result of alterations in normal brain chemistry caused by heavy drinking. It is no more logical to blame the alcoholic for altered behavior than to demand accountability from someone with Alzheimer's disease. They don't choose to behave as they do. They are ill, victims of chemical changes they cannot control.
My search for an explanation for my son's suicide finally ended when I came to understand how alcohol had affected his brain, altered his personality, and turned him into a suicidal depressed young man.
But this understanding gave rise to more questions. What could be done to prevent similar tragedies? Is there no way to undo the damage alcohol causes?
As I pondered these questions, I began to wonder about the value of the conventional approach to the treatment of alcoholism. For all the spiritual resources provided by AA and the psychological insights available in counseling and group therapy, no attempts were being made to undo the damaging effects of alcohol on the delicate chemical balance that keeps the brain and central nervous system functioning normally. Why weren't we trying to fix what alcohol had broken?
Was I overlooking something? Surely others had asked the same questions that nagged at me. George Vaillant had brilliantly and conclusively demonstrated that the alcoholic's unstable behavior is a consequence, not a cause, of alcoholism and that personality changes stem from the physical damage done by this disease. Was there no treatment to repair that damage?
Back to the Drawing Board
In 1896 Sigmund Freud predicted that "the future may teach us to exercise a direct influence by means of chemical substances upon the amounts of energy and their distribution in the apparatus of the mind." By 1927 he had become "firmly convinced that one day all these mental disturbances we are trying to understand will be treated by means of hormones or similar substances."
Today, we see how right he was. We now have drugs to treat depression, the schizophrenias, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. And lying unused in libraries everywhere are reports on studies of the destructive effect of alcohol on the mind and body through its power to inhibit access to key amino acids, vitamins, minerals, trace elements, enzymes, hormones, and essential fatty acids-the natural chemicals that support life and sustain sanity.
My question was whether it would be possible to restore depleted or damaged natural chemicals. If it was, I theorized, recovery from alcoholism might be more successful than it was with current treatment.
Nobel Prize laureate Linus Pauling coined the word "orthomolecular" to describe the process of "establishing the right molecules in the body by varying the concentrations of substances normally present and required for optimum health." Could orthomolecular treatment be the answer I sought? At the time I had been working as a chemical-dependency counselor for five years and was weary of seeing people discharged when they were still depressed and ill. My peers didn't see what I was getting at. Small wonder, their training hadn't included the study of the physical basis of psychological problems.
But the clients understood. They were painfully aware that therapy had failed to eliminate their cravings, anxiety, insomnia, depression, and mental confusion. I finally decided to test my theories to see what would happen by combining biochemical repair with traditional treatment for alcoholism. In January 1981, I established the Health Recovery Center as a pilot program offering physical detoxification and biochemical repair along with counseling and participation in Alcoholics Anonymous.
We focused on the internal symptoms as well as the obvious external calamities that brought our clients to treatment. We knew they could put their calamities behind them, but it would take more than talk to relieve the agony emanating from their chemically disrupted brains.
Biochemical Repair
Our biochemical repair program is built around two premises
1.Addressing the substances that must be kept out of the alcoholic's body (including alcohol and other drugs, such as nicotine, caffeine, and refined sugars)
2.Addressing the substances that must be restored to the brain and body (chemicals depleted by alcohol.)
We begin with a physical exam and laboratory testing to identify where damage has occurred. Clients are also screened for vulnerability to substances that can cause cravings for alcohol
At the outset we explain why it's so important that clients avoid caffeine, nicotine, and refined sugars in addition to alcohol. We were amazed at how much coffee our clients had been drinking; some were up to forty cups a day. Caffeine is a drug. Although it recently received a clean bill of health for those concerned about heart disease and cancer, it can complicate or retard recovery from alcohol. Caffeine pumps a lot of adrenaline into the bloodstream. This temporarily provides energy-the morning lift so many people get from their first cup of coffee. Adrenaline also dumps stored glycogen (sugar) into the bloodstream, which triggers an outpouring of insulin. This caffeine-triggered rush of sugar and insulin is no help for alcoholics attempting to stabilize their glucose metabolism.
Foods containing refined sugars are also off-limits because they intensify hypoglycemic symptoms (often described as "dry-drunk" behaviors).
Smoking and using snuff or chewing tobacco is bad for everyone, but many alcoholics already have a lower than normal resistance to disease and do not need any more health hazards than they have already accumulated.
Few treatment programs require clients to avoid these substances on the theory that patients should not have to give up anything more than alcohol. It is a sympathetic attitude we don't think our clients can afford.
From the start, our treatment results were dramatic. Even clients who had failed to recover repeatedly in the past did very well. After two years, we knew we were on the right track. Most clients recovered both their sobriety and their health. The time had come to collect scientific data to confirm (or disprove) what we thought was happening. The research became the basis of my Ph.D. dissertation. I collected data on one hundred alcoholic clients chosen at random. Each was followed for up to three and a half years after treatment. Briefly, this is what I found:
Ninety-eight percent had either an alcoholic parent or close relative. (The other two were adopted, so their genetic heritage was unknown.)
There were ninety-eight previous treatment experiences among the one hundred patients (some had been treated more than once; others, not at all). Of those previously treated, more than half had relapsed by the third month following their last treatment
After one year, only 24 percent had remained sober.
Of the one hundred clients, eighty-eight had abnormal glucose metabolism (hypoglycemia or diabetes).
Many were deficient in a number of essential nutrients.
Seventy-three percent tested positive for allergies to various foods; the most common allergies were to wheat and dairy products.
Fifty-five percent were sensitive to some environmental chemical, principally to products containing hydrocarbons, including ethanols and gasoline.
Twenty-five percent suffered from candida-related complex, a condition stemming from an over colonization of opportunistic yeast, Candida albicans, in the body. CRC can underlie depression, acute fatigue, indigestion, migraine headaches vaginal and sinus infections, premenstrual syndrome, and impaired immune system functioning. Alcoholics are particularly susceptible because their high intake of sugar (in the form of alcohol) provides a receptive environment for the growth of these intestinal fungi. Poor nutrition can also set the stage far CRC, as can frequent use of antibiotics to treat the infections to which alcoholics in poor health are prone (antibiotics can upset the natural balance of protective bacteria in the intestinal tract that holds Candida albicans in check).
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