Chris Prentiss' Four Causes of Alcoholism

"People use because it feels good"

I agree regarding Cocaine. I once thought Cocaine was the ultimate buzz and I snorted it purely for the buzz.

Alcohol is different. I don't think it is such a great buzz but it does heighten social occasions up to a point and then the negatives start to kick in. What I mean is people drink because they enjoy it, but I didn't start to hammer the booze because I enjoyed it. In my case it was because I did have an inability to cope with a current situation. The drunkenness then became a habit, and some unresolved events from the past also helped to contribute with continued Alcohol abuse.

These factors contributed to my problem, but I think the biggest single factor which set me up for 30 odd years of destructive drinking was AA and its totally self-destructive concept of powerlessness and the disease model.

I firmly believe that if Moderation Management or HAMS and the Orange Papers and other Anti AA websites and videos had been around in 1980, I would have lead a better far more productive life

AA must be stopped, every day it exists it destroys lives

Which part is not bunk?

"chemical imbalance is a lie"

With regard to substance abuse or mental illness?

Please support your allegation.

Many people unknowingly medicate neurological imbalances to try and maintain stable emotions. This has long known to be true.

How do you know this? Do you have access to the brain scans of many people? How many alcoholics ever even have a brain scan? What would a chemical "balance" look like? No doubt chemical reactions play a huge role in life, but how do we know when a person's brain chemistry is imbalanced and not just the way the person's brain is "supposed" to be? Don't the psychiatrists simply vote to decide which mental chemical compositions would be in their best (financial?) interests to define as "imbalanced," and then start prescribing medications for people who they think meet that diagnosis (often without doing a brain scan to verify anything)?

I support FTF on this point. I am a lifelong sufferer of bipolar disorder. I began trying to medicate the condition with alcohol starting as a pre-teen, and as a teen with alcohol and drugs. However, I was not diagnosed until I was in my 30s. I wasn't drinking and using to be part of the crowd. I was deliberately using substances to try to manage mood swings that drove me to either crawl into a hole in the ground or become so agitated that I deliberately did harm to myself or others. No euphoria was involved in the mania, just extreme, painful, nagging aggravation. In some cases alcohol calmed the beast. In other cases it exacerbated it. Cocaine didn't help. Heroin did. In any case it was never predictable how the substances were going to play into the mood swings.

I never knew I was trying to manage a mental illness. I thought at first it was pre-adolescent shame over sexual abuse and that I was controlling with it substances. Then I thought it was adolescent angst that I was manipulating. Later I thought it was artistic blocks or relationship problems. Later still I thought I was trying to keep my marriage together with substances. It wasn't until after I was sober five years and divorced a year that a trusted friend and psychologist concluded that the depression was not situational.

It is highly likely that many, many people are trying to manage different mental illnesses with alcohol and drugs. If they're like me they just know that their own personal "normal" disposition is intolerable and they need to try to do what they can to modify it somehow. Lots of them don't even know that what they have is an illness. The fact that it is "normal" for them is no consolation whatever. Human beings hate and fear pain, whether physical or mental. We spend tremendous resources trying to escape pain or end-run pain or eliminate pain however we can. It is not for any layman to judge the characteristics or intensity or crippling effects of this pain. Psychiatrists and psychologists mostly do the best they can with their training. Some MDs are more interested in their kickbacks from clinical trials and such, but as long as I've been around the practitioners, which is almost 50 years as a patient, I have to say I've only run up against one or two who seemed to have their own interests on the front burner and mine on the back.

I realize this is an invitation to all OPF posters to turn into snarling, sniveling hyenas, picking pieces from the carcass of this revelation and gleefully turning my account of mental illness into a farce and me into an object of ridicule again. But if someone on this form doesn't share something valid and fearless the purpose of the forum is no more than a "Did not!", ""Did too!", "Did not!", "Did too!" playground for children who have no more to share than their own impotent plays for territory and "power". So do what you will, you critics, like lfop and NoAAUK and Coben and all the rest. I just think First Things First should be supported on his point.

That's a good point.