How can you tell if a person is becoming an alcoholic and who is more prone to addiction?

Who is an alcoholic? What are the signs that a person is developing an addiction? Psychiatrist and narcologist Vyacheslav Solodukho answers these and other questions of the project "In the subject. HEALTH " .

- Who do doctors consider alcoholics?

- Sick people. There are criteria of the International Classification of Diseases that allow to establish the diagnosis of "alcohol dependence syndrome". They must be observed for at least a month during one year. These are criteria such as constant ALCOHOL consumption, loss of some interests,alcohol takes the leading place in a person's value system - that is, it replaces hobbies, sports, family relationships "fly" from drinking. The so-called "protective" gag reflex disappears. And a number of other symptoms that allow the DOCTOR to establish a diagnosis.

- Each person has their own line. The saddest thing is that it is very difficult to track it even from a professional point of view. It is impossible to track the line in society, in everyday life, it is individual for each person. Someone will not become an alcoholic in their entire life, and someone in 5-10 years will turn into someone we can meet in everyday life, standing in line in the morning for a "fix". It depends on the individual characteristics of each of our bodies.

- Who is more prone to addictions? Maybe education, genetics, age, some kind of health predisposition?

- Many authors at one time wrote and tried to identify some phenotypes, predisposing factors. But, as practice shows, ALCOHOLISM develops in everyone in the same way. Again, you correctly noted that the more intellectually developed a person is, the slower his addiction develops . The less educated, so to speak, a person is, the faster alcoholism will develop.

In women, as literary data, life experience and practice show, alcoholism is very malignant, that is, it develops very quickly. Again, this depends on the female body, on those hormonal structures that distinguish a woman from a man , and on psychological factors. As a rule, women often hide their bad mood, depressive symptoms, drinking low-alcohol drinks - champagne, wine . Good, expensive alcohol, which subsequently becomes worse and worse, when ethyl alcohol is included in the physiological processes of the body, when the consumption process is no longer limited ...

Social status also plays a big role in the development of alcoholism. For the simple reason that the higher a person is socially, the less susceptible he is to alcoholism. On the other hand, if it is a high social status, [alcohol] can be taken for granted.

- Writers, actors - very often it is through them that all this is romanticized.

- They romanticize it because alcohol is a liberating substance for them. It is not for nothing that they say: to paint a picture, you need inspiration. And an artist, let's say, drinks a certain amount of wine for this. And everyone justifies themselves before drinking another dose of alcohol: "I drink so that I feel this way." Or: "I had a hard day at work. I need to relieve stress, my boss yelled at me, something didn't work out for me." And after a while, all this leads to the fact that a person either merges with some drinking company, or begins to drink alone.

| Prepared based on BELTA video. Photos from open Internet sources.

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