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Alcohol abuse typically leads to serious personal losses, and it is a psychiatric condition
in its own right. Dr. Graeme Cunningham, director of the Addiction Treatment Program
at the Homewood Health Centre in Guelph, Ontario, says that 7% of Canada's population is actively alcoholic.
Dr. Wilson Lit, director of the Community Division at the Homewood, says men generally are twice as vulnerable to alcohol dependency as women, with a lifetime risk of 20%. He adds that for males with schizophrenia, the life time risk is 30- 40%. I asked him about the 50% figure I've heard at conferences, and he pointed out that when you add illicit drug abuse, the figure is much higher. There is good evidence to suggest that many people who become alcoholics actually metabolize alcohol differently than everybody else. For these people alcohol is a much more addictive substance. Some people are born alcoholics in the same way that some people are at a greater risk of developing schizophrenia. It's genetic. If one of your relatives is an alcoholic, you are at a greater risk for alcoholism yourself. Typically, an alcoholic will deny they have a problem with alcohol in spite of serious consequences resulting from their drinking. And they will keep drinking heavily. In some ways, that is similar to schizophrenia. Sufferers have minimal insight about something that is all too obvious to an outside observer. A fundamental tenet of Alcoholics Anonymous is that they are "powerless over alcohol". They can never return to recreational use of alcohol. They can't control their drinking once they've had that first sip. It may take weeks, months, even years, but that first sip will lead to serious personal losses. At Homewood, patients are cautioned about hidden sources of alcohol, like mouthwash. Most mouthwashes have a fairly high alcohol content, and it's enough to start some people drinking again. People with both schizophrenia and substance abuse are often poorly served by mental health systems across North America. The addiction treatment programs expect a psychotic patient to be stabilized before they can be admitted to their addiction program, and the psychiatrists say they can't help a psychotic patient if they have an active substance abuse problem. Current research shows that the best way to treat concurrent disorders, such as addiction and schizophrenia, is to treat both illnesses at the same time, using an integrated approach. Few such programs exist yet though. Every psychiatrist who treats schizophrenia has some patients who have a substance
The copyright of the article Schizophrenia and Alcohol in Schizophrenia is owned by . Permission to republish Schizophrenia and Alcohol in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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