The creation of a facility such as the Hamilton centre was a key finding of Victoria’s mental health royal commission
When Benn Veenker first confided in his GP about his struggle with depression and alcohol, he was holding back the full extent of his addictions.
“I was so scared of being able to say to somebody, ‘I can’t get through a day without drinking’,” he remembers.
Continue reading...More than 10m people consume alcohol at levels that pose a risk to their health, experts say
GPs in England and Wales are being urged to ask patients detailed questions about their drinking habits amid concerns that thousands of people with alcohol issues are “slipping through the net”.
More than 10 million people consume alcohol at levels that pose a risk to their health, according to experts. Millions are mildly or moderately dependent on alcohol, while about 600,000 people have severe alcohol dependency and will, as a result, benefit hugely from professional alcohol treatment.
Continue reading...Positive results in first ‘rigorous’ trial investigating compound’s effect on alcohol use
The most rigorous test yet of psilocybin as a treatment for alcoholism has found that the compound in psychedelic mushrooms helped heavy drinkers cut back or quit entirely.
Psilocybin, found in several species of mushrooms, can cause hours of vivid hallucinations. Indigenous people have used it in healing rituals and scientists are exploring whether it can ease depression or help longtime smokers quit.
Continue reading...Some problem drinkers also reducing heating to afford rising alcohol costs, according to Public Health Scotland
Scotland’s minimum alcohol pricing policy has not encouraged problem drinkers to consume less but has prompted some to cut back on food or heating in order to afford rising costs, according to the first evaluation of its impact on those who drink alcohol at harmful levels.
The Scottish National party’s flagship policy, championed by Nicola Sturgeon when she was health minister and introduced after successive court challenges by the Scotch Whisky Association, came into force in May 2018. It introduced a legally enforced minimum price for all alcoholic drinks of 50p a unit and aimed to tackle chronic alcohol abuse by targeting low-cost, high-strength drinks.
Continue reading...My drinking and drug use pushed me over the edge into a complete breakdown. Then a stint in rehab made me question how much we really understand about addiction
I’m lying in bed when I hear the commotion. I peer through the doorway of my room, and right outside, the new guy is getting in Ruiz’s face. There’s a phone right outside the door, one of those sturdy metal payphones like one you’d see on a street corner, and Ruiz, a gentle older man with shoulders stooped by the demoralisation of his nth relapse and hospitalisation, is just trying to talk to his family. But the new guy has been manic and pacing since he arrived a few hours ago, and he won’t take no for an answer.
I watch the new guy stalk the other way across the doorway, muttering to himself, menacing even in retreat. Then a warning shout echoes from much too far in the distance, and he appears once again – flying, near horizontal – to tackle Ruiz, dragging him off the phone.
Continue reading...The market in no- and low-alcohol drinks is booming in the UK as more people swap the festive hangover for mindful drinking
The concept of a Christmas without champagne, wine or whisky is counterintuitive to many. But this festive season, growing numbers of Britons are eschewing alcohol and gearing up for a teetotal – or at least partially so – celebration, according to retailers.
Sales in the no- and low-alcohol category, also known as “NoLo”, are expected to grow by 17% in the UK this year, reports IWSR Drinks Market Analysis, and will hit almost 19 million cases and a value of $741m (£558m). Meanwhile, Sainsbury’s, Waitrose and Tesco all report that sales of NoLo drinks have seen huge rises year on year, a trend they expect to continue in the run-up to Christmas, amid a rise in “mindful drinking”.
Continue reading...In this quasi-religious programme, ‘working the steps’ is the remedy for any problem, but for me the cracks soon started to show
Eight of us sat together in a circle in a wooden shed, an outbuilding at a large country house, somewhere in the south of England. The door was ajar, and spring light flooded the room. “Can anyone name any treatment methods for addiction, other than the 12 steps?” asked a counsellor.
“Cognitive behavioural therapy?” offered a patient.
Continue reading...The first thing to think about is what you hope to achieve by replying to him, and whether this is achievable
My dad is in his 70s and has contacted me on Facebook. I have not yet replied. I last spoke to him almost 20 years ago, shortly after my mum died. I was 17, and he was angry with me for ignoring him. In my early childhood my dad lived with us only briefly, but was often drunk and angry, and I heard stories of him hitting my mum.
My mum left him when I was four and I saw him again when I was eight, when I was expected to keep him company; if I didn’t he would go to the pub and get very drunk. One time I went to play with my friends, and when I came home he was so drunk he hit my mum and threw my dog against a painting. That day I decided I hated my dad.
Continue reading...Alcohol’s allure was powerful when we were growing up and those born after us consume far less. Now booze is falling out of fashion, is it time to assess old habits?
My first job in journalism was editing a free magazine called Rasp. In 1995, we ran a competition for a year’s supply of Two Dogs lemon brew, the Australian alcopop. Two Dogs tried to send us 365 bottles, and I negotiated them up to 1,000, indignant that a bottle a day could constitute a “supply”. It is the only time I’ve ever played hardball. Nobody entered the competition because we didn’t have any readers, and nor did we have any staff. The two of us, me and the designer, drank the whole lot in the space of two months. A constant drip feed of 4.5% ABV, all day. If anybody asked – there was a much larger team upstairs running TNT, a freesheet for expat Australians – we’d say it was a British tradition, going back to medieval times, when workers would sip ale because of the contaminated water supply. “But medieval ale would have been more like 0.5%,” they might have protested, except they were also constantly drunk, and at lunchtime we’d all go to the pub, 60 people in crocodile formation marching down the street, like a misbegotten nursery outing.
So the cliche of the drunken journalist happens to be true, but in the early 90s it was also true of teachers. Dave Lawrence, 56, co-author of Scarred for Life, of which more shortly, remembers his teacher training: “There was a pub across the road and at lunchtime, all the teachers would head over there, and all afternoon they would reek of booze.” It wasn’t really sectoral – this was just generation X. Colin Angus, a senior research fellow in the Sheffield Alcohol Research Group, is 39. He’s not generation X, which is usually defined as those born between 1965 and 1980. But in his pre-academic career in electrical wholesaling, “Everyone was always talking about the good old days of long, boozy lunches.”
Continue reading...Women’s protests led to prohibition in Bihar but can alcohol bans end domestic abuse and harassment?
Holding sticks and brooms, the women marched to the liquor shop in the centre of Konar village. It was a rare ambush in the staunchly patriarchal Bihar state in eastern India. But they were at breaking point.
“In every village women were troubled by alcohol. Men harassed them on the streets. Husbands beat them at home,” says Sunita Devi, 52, a former seamstress who led the crowd. “When they saw us they gained courage that we can come together and fight.”
Continue reading...She cooked, watched Countdown and was mentored by the legendary singer. Now, 10 years after her death, Dionne Bromfield has finally addressed the grief she couldn’t deal with aged 15
Dionne Bromfield is leaning into the screen as we talk on Zoom, recounting the moment 10 years ago when she received the news that would change her life for ever. On a sunny July day, the 15-year-old singer was waiting to go on stage. She was supporting the boyband The Wanted on tour in Wales, the atmosphere backstage fizzing with energy before each show. However, that day something felt off. People were unusually quiet, and no one would meet her eyes. Eventually, she was told something was wrong: “It’s Amy.”
Amy Winehouse, whose remarkable, all-too-brief career ended with her death a decade ago this month, had been the teenager’s godmother, friend and mentor. Winehouse had nurtured Bromfield’s burgeoning vocal skills and helped her break into a notoriously competitive industry. For years after her death, Bromfield couldn’t listen to Amy’s music, let alone think about her. After two albums and a stint presenting the CBBC show Friday Download, the singer who had been marked out by many as one to watch and performed on live television with Winehouse, stepped back from music.
Continue reading...At my lowest ebb, I found hope in wickedly funny Leah, who lit up the crisis centre where we met. But just months later, she was dead. Could I stop my grief pulling me back under?
Over the years there have been only a few people I would have classed as best friends. People whom I counted on in my darkest moments. When I was at my lowest, and feeling more alone than ever, I met Leah. She was an incredible person who showed me how to find joy and belonging even in the worst possible circumstances. But within less than 12 months she was dead, and life was changed for ever.
We first met at Scarborough Survivors, the mental health crisis cafe I started attending in December 2018. I was 21, homeless and sofa-surfing, and I didn’t want to be alive any more. The cafe – open until 1am every morning – was my last option. It was a Saturday night, just before Christmas. Leah came in wearing a bright pink Adidas tracksuit and one of her many pairs of Nike Airs. Her thick Welsh accent echoed around the place, and as soon as she started talking, the atmosphere changed. I could tell from the off that humour was one of her coping mechanisms. It was hard to tell how old she was; I sensed some immaturity, but also a deep wisdom. I later learned that she was only 28, and the wisdom came from experiencing unimaginable trauma.
Continue reading...The legendary actor reflects on her riches-to-rags childhood, confronting depression and alcoholism – and dancing with Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire
Leslie Caron and her companion, Jack, greet me at the front of their apartment. They make a well-matched couple – slight, chic, immaculately coiffured. Caron, the legendary dancer and actor, is 90 in two weeks’ time. Jack, her beloved shih tzu, is about nine.
Caron heads off to make the tea, with Sidney Bechet’s summery jazz playing in the background. I am left alone with Jack to explore the living room. It feels as if I am tunnelling through the history of 20th-century culture. Here is a photo of a pensive François Truffaut; below is a smirking Warren Beatty. The centrepiece on the wall is a huge watercolour of Caron’s great friend Christopher Isherwood, painted by his partner, Don Bachardy. To the left is Louis Armstrong, to the right Rudolf Nureyev, with whom she starred in 1977’s Valentino, and further along is Jean Renoir, who she says was like a father to her. And we have barely started.
Continue reading...This week sees the opening of the first UK high-street clinic offering psychedelic-assisted therapy. Could popping psilocybin be the future of mental healthcare?
In the summer of 1981, when he was 13, Grant crashed a trail motorbike into a wall at his parents’ house in Cambridgeshire. He’d been hiding it in the shed, but “it was far too powerful for me, and on my very first time starting it in the garden, I smashed it into a wall”. His mother came outside to find the skinny teenager in a heap next to the crumpled motorbike. “I was in a lot of trouble.”
Grant hadn’t given this childhood memory much thought in the intervening years, but one hot August day in 2019, it came back to him with such clarity that, at 53, now a stocky father of two, he suddenly understood it as a clue to his dangerously unhealthy relationship with alcohol.
Continue reading...For better and for worse, drinking has been a constant thread running through writer Megan Nolan’s relationships. She reflects on the dual thrills of alcohol and romance
From the very beginning, whenever there was a crush, there was also a drink in my hand. In his novel High Fidelity, Nick Hornby’s narrator Rob, an unhappy vinyl obsessive, asks himself: “Which came first, the music or the misery?” Did he learn to be unhappy from the sad songs he loved, or did the songs comfort him after the unhappiness was already a fact? In my case, the question is something like this: which came first, the booze or the boys? Did I just happen to begin my romantic life at the same time as my drinking life? Or were my infatuations and love stories authored – or at least fuelled – by the alcohol that accompanied them?
This is not the story of a tragic, ruined woman who destroys all her relationships through drinking. In some, I drank very moderately; in most others, only to good-spirited excess, which caused no harm. There is no redemption arc here, no coming to the light. I still drink now. It is one of my personal bugbears that we seem as a culture flatly incapable of discussing many of life’s most complex issues without urgently needing to name and solve them, preferably with formal medical interventions. And so I can’t speak about a plodding, hopeless soul sickness that afflicts me at times without being cornered into describing it as depression or an anxiety disorder. This is not to say that these things don’t exist; of course they do, and over the years I’ve taken medication for both. But the terms and the drugs are too blunt as tools to address the infinite realm of human suffering and struggle that they sit within.
Continue reading...Long-term social isolation is as bad for your health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. What has the last year meant for those who don’t share their homes?
When the first headlines about coronavirus began to appear in January 2020, they had little impact on south Londoner TJ, 25. “It seems outrageous now, but I thought: ‘I’m young, I’m healthy, I’ll be fine.’” By the time the first lockdown was announced, his mindset had begun to shift. He’d been single “for ever” and his housemate was spending lockdown with her parents, but he felt that same batten-down-the-hatches optimism many did in the era of weekly clapping and Zoom quizzes. “But that first weekend, the silence of the house and all the hours to fill – I got this inkling… mentally, I don’t know where I’ll be at the end of this. Four weeks in, I was genuinely scared for my mental health, I wasn’t coping at all.”
TJ is one of an estimated 7.7 million people in the UK who lived alone for most or all of the last year. “It’s not a game of Top Trumps, it’s not like my anxiety is more profound,” he says. “But it is different when you’re experiencing it all on your own.” In November 2020 the Office for National Statistics released findings that showed acute loneliness had climbed to record levels, with 8% of adults (around 4.2 million people) feeling “always or often lonely”, and 16-29-year-olds twice as likely as the over-70s to experience loneliness in the pandemic. “You’d never think fear of missing out would exist when we’re all stuck at home,” TJ says. “But I’d be scrolling through Instagram, seeing friends with their boyfriends or housemates, and thinking: ‘I wish I had someone. I feel so alone.’”
Continue reading...Find a job, lose the job, go to jail: Guardian reporter Mario Koran found himself in a dangerous cycle. But behind bars, he discovered a new purpose
In July 2016, I stood behind a podium in a San Diego banquet hall and wept in front of a room full of reporters. I’d just been named the city’s journalist of the year for my work on a series that helped unseat a school board president and led to a criminal conviction.
I had reached a peak: I had a meaningful job in a postcard-perfect beach city. A wife I loved, a gorgeous baby girl and another on the way. Most everywhere I went, people told me I had a beautiful family, and I knew it was true.
Continue reading...Reputation for heavy drinking on the slide since Putin measures including curbs on alcohol sales
Russia may still have a reputation as a nation of heavy drinkers, but a report by the World Health Organization shows alcohol consumption has dropped by 43% since 2003.
The WHO put the decrease down to a series of measures brought in under the sport-loving president, Vladimir Putin, including restrictions on alcohol sales and the promotion of healthy lifestyles.
Continue reading...I drank to pretend my life was more interesting. Feeling slow or a little sad in the mornings was so normal I barely noticed it
Now what? I have given up alcohol for a month. That’s nothing special. Thousands of people do Dry July or Feb Fast or some random month. But it is a big thing. I hadn’t had 30 days off alcohol my entire adult life.
The reason I thought it was a good idea isn’t unique either. It’s boringly familiar. I’m middle aged and, after drinking modestly for decades, it had crept up. One glass of wine a night became two, and then three and – no point in skirting around the facts here – too often it was a bottle, sometimes more. Occasionally, if I was particularly anxious, I’d buy a bottle of wine during the day and drink the lot.
Continue reading...Helen Witty thought she had taught her children all about the dangers of drinking. She was raised with the knowledge that her great-grandfather’s alcoholism had led him to suicide. “It’s in the family,” her mother warned her. In a classic expression of the ripple effect of harmful drinking, Witty kept her own consumption modest. And she taught her two children to understand and to be careful of the long shadow cast by other people’s drinking.
But what none of the family had prepared for was the day when Helen Marie, Witty’s 16-year-old daughter, stood in the drive of their Florida home wearing her skates; she wanted to destress before a big school play. She flipped around, blew her mother a kiss and said she would be right back.
Continue reading...