June 22nd, 2010 10:02 am
Among his many contributions to our knowledge of alcoholism is the outstanding list of signs and symptoms of what constitutes a “downside drinker,” a phrase coined by Dr. Durfee and which he uses rather than alcoholic. Some critics of Dr. Durfee aver that “downside drinker” could be a Victorianesque euphemism for an economic elite which cannot abdomen the cruel truth of “alcoholic.” This is not the case. Dr. Durfee explains that ” ‘chronic alcoholic,’ in law, in criminology, and in sociology, has assumed a strong suggestion of moral stigma.” There’s no doubt of it. With Alcoholics Anonymous, we tend to believe that no stigma should be connected to the term. Each effort should be created to purpose out the patent absurdity and ignorance of such a stigma in dealing with a disease. For just because the diabetic cannot live without insulin, so the alcoholic cannot live with alcohol.
Dr. Durfee’s reasons for coining the term, downside drinker, rather than bucking the current, were motivated by therapeutic experience. He found in treatment of “alcoholics” that this suggestion of “weakness and ethical unfitness might do serious psychological hurt to patient and therapist alike in discussing the issues posed by alcohol.” Dr. Durfee defines the matter drinker as “a person in whose life drink overshadows, threatens, or has already destroyed what we tend to consider traditional living.”
The primary of Dr. Durfee’s eight signs and symptoms is “to draw a blank”—that not uncommon experience in which, when a sure number of drinks, the drinker is intoxicated however maintains consciousness, apparently alert to what he is saying and doing, solely to remember nothing whatever of what he has said or done the next day. This incidence could be a definite sign of physiological changes taking place inside the drinker. Dr. Durfee calls the second sign “additional-curricular drinks.”
This takes many forms, such as “pantry drinking” at parties; feeling the requirement for “a quick one” before the party or the meeting; or feeling that the drinks are too weak or served with too great an interval between them. These are all indications of the “incipient downside drinker.”The third sign is “an unwillingness to speak regarding liquor as a downside in his life,” and “a readiness to accuse friends and family of imagined slights and wrongs.” The fourth is “rationalization.” In the start this takes the form of finding all kinds of excuses for taking a drink. “When rationalization is carried over from justifying a few drinks to justifying a succession of drinks, with no contemplatein a position amount of abstinence, then the familiar mental pattern of the matter drinker has taken shape.” “Unwillingness to attend conferences, dinners, and social functions where liquor isn’t served,” the fifth sign, indicates “that alcohol has lost its true relative worth to its victim.” At this stage “the prospect of a drink is more pleasing than any alternative aspect of a celebration, a conference, daily or an hour of relaxation.”