Credit: Daily Mail
The last time lawyer Erika Byrd talked her way out of an alcohol rehab center, her father took her to lunch.
“Dad, I know what alcohol has done to me,” she told him that day in January 2011. “I know what it has made me do to you and mom. But that wasn’t me.”
By the time she died three months later, Byrd had blocked her parents’ calls because they kept having her involuntarily committed. They once had a magistrate judge hold a hearing at her hospital bed. He ordered herto undergo a month of in-patient treatment.
Byrd, who died in April 2011 at the age of 42, is among the rising number of people in the United States who have been killed by alcohol in the last decade.
It’s an increase that has been obscured by the opioid epidemic. But alcohol kills more people each year than overdoses – through cancer, liver cirrhosis, pancreatitis and suicide, among other ways.
From 2007 to 2017, the number of deaths attributable to alcohol increased 35 percent, according to […]
As a psychologist with a specialty in substance abuse I have to say all of us who have treated women with substance abuse issues are very aware of the reports about “couple glasses of wine” in the evening when the “glasses” are large tumblers, one dimension of the women’s alcohol problems
But the factors contributing to these problems are complex, multi-faceted, and interactional and therefore not reducible to one or two easily that are easily targeted, particularly with the “blame game”. Currently humanity is conducting a large scale, social experiment on changing the social nature and dynamics of men’s and women’s roles and identities, particularly in the outer work world. And while a certain aspect of societies are constructed, and therefore may be able to reconstructed there are some fixed (at least for the foreseeable future) biological factors that determine and constrain roles, the most obvious being that humans reproduce by way of women growing them in their bellies. And all the differences between men and women, which are a result of this process, results in some very large challenges for women participating in the work world’s’ social structures, which were developed mostly by and for men. So it should be no surprise that alcohol, one of human kind’s oldest stress relievers, has become a problem for a lot of women.
And I say all this being married, (with kids), to a highly skilled, competent and successful professional woman (without a substance use problem).