Sunday, April 23, 2017
Thursday, April 20, 2017
Good efacts of Alcohol
The stigma of addiction may not be going away anytime soon. As recently as 2014, a study at Johns Hopkins University found that people with substance use disorders were significantly more susceptible to negative stereotypes than people with other forms of mental illness.
That public stigma is increasingly harder to maintain, however, thanks to popular social networking tools like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, which are reinventing the ways we talk about addiction.
For one thing, such outlets have provided greater visibility to the struggles of those with SUDs. It’s easy to stigmatize people with addiction when you don’t know them, or when their struggles are hidden and out of view, but when addiction shows up in your Facebook feed as a personal post, the disease suddenly has a name and a face and is visible, maybe for the first time.
One writer describes “watching friends recover from addiction on Facebook” in an article in The Atlantic:
Through likes and comments, I’ve watched my hometown of Perry, Ohio, disappear into and come back from heroin addiction.
To her point, status updates and comments on Facebook are, in effect, fluid, open diaries written in real-time by those in the trenches of addiction, whether celebrating another day sober, dispatching a cry for help or grieving the loss of a friend to overdose.
That relates to another trend regarding how social networking tools like Facebook are changing the conversation regarding addiction. Last June, Facebook announced that it would begin ranking stories in users’ feeds according to those that are “most meaningful,” and it promised users “the most personalized experience,” making the feed “subjective, personal and unique”—in other words, ultra-customized stories that personalize addiction and other news and current events.
The instantaneous mass-sharing of images on social media is a fitting example of this trend toward greater personalization of addiction.
One case in point is the photo taken last year of two heroin users in a car, having just overdosed as their four-year-old child looked on from the backseat. The same day it was posted by the East Ohio police department, the image went viral, generating 22,000 shares and 3,000 comments on Facebook. The photo’s shock value apparently served its intended purpose—an alarming and empathetic wake-up call to residents regarding the severity of the epidemic ravaging their community.
The promotion of thought-provoking photo and video campaigns that allow users to express their personal views or experiences is another way in which addiction is being de-stigmatized via social media. These campaigns run the gamut.
Last spring, a coalition of treatment and recovery organizations teamed up for “Recovery Advocacy Action Week 2016,” which featured a different interactive theme on social media for each day of the week. Monday was #ThisIsWhatRecoveryLooksLike, and participants were invited to share a photo of what recovery looked like in their own lives. Tuesday was #OurStoriesHavePower, and participants were encouraged to share a bit of their recovery story in their social networks and by tagging their legislators, and so on.
In another campaign, Partnership for Drug-Free Kids invited its Facebook audience to give their thoughts on “Why Prevention of Drug and Alcohol Abuse Is Important to You.” In shared selfies, parents, teens and others held up their answers in handwritten scrawl, in effect shining a light on the very personal ways in which drugs and alcohol affect ordinary Americans like you and me.
The National Institute on Drug Abuse has parlayed a similar social media strategy in its “Shatter the Myths” campaign, an outreach directed to teens addressing the addiction stigma head-on. This time, though, participants can also share videos that answer the question, “Why do you want to shatter the myths about drug addiction?”
These real and personalized glimpses of the addiction epidemic have more compelling, mass appeal—akin to that of a social protest, for example—than what a celebrity talking head might generate in a public -service announcement.
The share features of tools like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram don’t just offer greater visibility and personalization to the struggles of those with addiction; they are also venues for building community and solidarity among those in recovery, but with the perk of more anonymity when desired.
Features like Twitter chat and Facebook Live are good examples. When the leaders of Recovery Advocacy Action Week hosted a Twitter chat led by well-known voices in the recovery movement, it was a bit like a town-hall meeting on steroids: Identified only by their Twitter handles, participants arguably were more inclined to voice their raw, unedited concerns, paving the way for more honest, vulnerable and, in turn, deeper, more authentic connections.
There are, of course, limitations to the de-stigmatizing power of social media tools. In #Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media, Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein worries that the ultra-customized personalization of news on Facebook and other social media channels is contributing to greater polarization, fragmentation and extremism in American society, such that users of social media end up in a bubble of their own making, in which the only views they hear echo their own. (For Sunstein, that’s troublesome because what’s at stake is nothing other than the very future of American democracy. As an antidote, Sunstein recommends that Facebook add “serendipity buttons” to promote unexpected or “surprise” encounters with different viewpoints.)
Such concerns are also applicable to the stigma of addiction. When what we are reading and conversing about in our social media circles is only a reflection of what we want to read and converse about—when the views and experiences shared there are mere reflections of our own—we can find ourselves in the same proverbial echo chamber that Sunstein warns about.
Ultimately, I suspect that ending the stigma of addiction will require transcending such boundaries. In the meantime, the greater visibility, personalization and community that outlets like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram extend to conversations about addiction and recovery can only be a good thing.
Tuesday, April 18, 2017
Safe drinking tips
Safe drinking tips:
- Know your limit & plan ahead.
- Eat food before and while you drink.
- Sip your drink (slow down).
- Skip a drink now and then and substitute with a non-alcoholic drink (another great tip is to have a glass of water with your drink, and sip on that between sips of your drink).
- Beware of unfamiliar drinks.
- Appoint a designated driver.
- Respect the rights of individuals who do not wish to drink.
- Keep track of how many drinks you are consuming.
- Space your drinks.
- Drink for quality vs. quantity.
- Avoid drinking games.
- Plan ahead for transportation — don’t drink and drive!
- Never accept a drink from someone you don’t know.
- When ordering a drink at the bar, watch the bartender make your drink so you can know how much alcohol you will be having.
- Alcohol and sex do not mix — drunken sex is not consensual sex.
- Careful what you combine, most drugs and alcohol do not mix well. Be sure to read all warning labels.
- If you are pregnant, might be pregnant, or are attempting to become pregnant, do not consume any type of alcoholic beverage.
Alcohol Consmption
A brief history of alcohol consumption in Australia
Alcohol consumption in Australia began at an annual high point of 13.6 litres of pure alcohol per head in the 1830s. It declined to 5.8 litres a year during the economic downturn in the 1890s, then to a nadir of 2.5 litres during the Great Depression.
After World War II, there was a long rise in per capita consumption to another high point of 13.1 litres in 1974-75. It then dropped again and rose slowly to the 2008-09 levels of ten litres.
There’s little doubt that alcohol is an important part of Australian culture. According to the author of The Rum State, Milton Lewis, heavy drinking was an established cultural norm transported to Australia at the time of colonisation.
It was the norm in Britain to drink heavily and gin epidemics were devastating entire communities at the time. Lewis says that alcohol in Europe had long served as a food and source of nutrition as the diets of the time were very restricted and there wasn’t a lot else to choose from.
Two drinking practices were established that still exist today. One is “shouting” in which each person in turn buys a round of drinks for the whole group; and the other, “work and bust”, is a prolonged drunken spree following a long period of hard work in the bush. This is basically an earlier term for the contemporary notion of binge drinking, and can be seen in the “Mad Monday” celebrations at the end of a football season.
But other factors were also at play. For a time, spirits were used in barter and convicts were part-paid in rum. In this way, rum became a currency of the colony - hence the term “a rum state”. The control of alcohol gave enormous political power. And alcohol was reportedly involved in the only military coup in Australia - the Rum rebellion in 1808.
Over the years, there have been many different social meanings of alcohol. In Australia and elsewhere, wine, brandy, beer and stout have been seen as good dietary supplements for invalids. Alcohol was once seen as a good, healthy food Lewis notes that it has been consumed as a sacrament, a toast, a fortifier, a sedative, a thirst-quencher, and a symbol of sophistication.
Temperance organisations sprang up in the early 19th century, and became active in Australian colonies from 1830s. They initially advocated moderation and would eventually demand prohibition. They were affiliated with Christian churches, and seen as a middle-class reaction to an upsurge in lower-class drinking of spirits, which was due to more industrialised production of distilled spirits, and the fear of the working class being more dangerous when drunk.
The highpoint of the temperance movement came during World War I and the Depression, when consumption went down dramatically across the English-speaking world. But after World War II, there was a backlash against the anti-alcohol movement. Drinking rates began to climb again along with growing prosperity and cultural shifts such as the changing role of women, and European immigration shaped the way we drank.
“Civilised” drinking – drinking with food and in moderation – became the norm. Wine became a much more popular drink by the 1960s and Australia invented the wine cask. A significant change occurred in Victoria in the 1980s with the Niewenhausen report, which promoted the liberalisation of licencing in Victoria. This was taken so keenly by successive Victorian governments that, on average, two new liquor licences were granted every day from 20 years from 1986.
But as large alcohol manufacturers increased their range of products, ramped up the amount they were producing, upped the sophistication and diversification of their advertising and allied themselves with major sports and the major media outlets, civilised drinking has not remained the norm for a sizeable proportion of the population. In the last two decades, binge drinking has again become fashionable.
And the harm these drinkers inflict on themselves and on a large proportion of the community is preventable.
It doesn’t have to be this way. History shows us that overall average rates of alcohol consumption in Australia can change quite dramatically over time, and that drinking practices are highly modifiable.
This is the first part of our series looking at alcohol and the drinking culture in Australia. Click on the links below to read the other articles:
Part Seven: Big Alcohol and Big Tobacco – boozem buddies?
Part Eight: Explainer: foetal alcohol spectrum disorders
Thursday, April 13, 2017
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