a day ago
My dad was beloved bartender and sheriff. He was also an alcoholic with disease.
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Listen to yourself.
'She's an alcoholic.'
'He's a drunk.'
Equivalent to a loser. A bum. A failure.
Those with alcohol use disorder are stigmatized by our tone of inferiority. We turn our noses at their actions. We believe they are less than us. In truth, they have partners and spouses who love them, children who rely on them and co-workers who brainstorm with them. Our historical disdain and distance are juxtapositioned with love. That makes it difficult to help them.
When I was 13 years old, our green "princess" phone rang like a chorus of birds on high speed. I stretched the tangled, spiral cord around the corner into the living room ready to settle in next to the World Book Encyclopedias.
'Hello,' my voice squeaked.
'Your father is a drunk. He's going to lose.' Click. The man on the phone sounded like Alfred Hitchcock, deep and disturbing. The call came in during Dad's re-election campaign for county sheriff.
On TV shows, drunks stumbled and fell into ditches. They drank out of bottles inside crumpled paper bags and spent the night in jail to sleep it off. Drunks couldn't hold jobs. They threw things across the room. Every Western had one town drunk who donned a scraggily beard, needed a bath and stumbled through the swinging doors of the saloon.
That wasn't my dad. He wore an ironed, white short-sleeved shirt, tie and black pants to work. In no way could he be a drunk.
But he was.
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After being a bartender for 25 years and undersheriff for four, my dad was elected Manitowoc County sheriff, which borders Lake Michigan halfway between Milwaukee and Green Bay. As a nine-year-old girl, I mixed three martinis for Dad each night after he came home from chasing criminals. After dinner, he mixed his own cocktails.
Later in his life, I admitted him to the hospital six times to detox. In addition, he entered a 30-day in-patient treatment center twice. One counselor wrote Dad was admitted to treatment 'under pressure from his family because of what he called a little drinking problem.' Even Dad didn't believe he could be a drunk.
Alcoholism is a serious disease. According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, people with alcoholism have a brain disorder. It can be mild, moderate or severe like heart disease or diabetes. Without help, people are sentenced to an earlier death from cancer or damage to the liver and heart. Long-term sobriety of individuals who misuse alcohol involves behavioral therapy, support groups, and/or medications. Seventy percent relapse.
Dad relapsed again and again. Each time he detoxed he wore a straitjacket tied to the hospital bed due to life-threatening delirium tremens from alcohol withdrawal. Doses of Librium to mitigate seizures calmed his nervous system, but he screamed and yelled at imaginary spiders on his legs. After being sober for a month, Dad's brain told him to keep drinking.
If alcohol abuse really is a brain disorder, why do we joke about it? U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth's allegations of alcohol abuse made him the butt of jokes on late night TV. We seem to be more empathetic to an individual's health condition if the disease doesn't cause slurring, stumbling, anger or crossing the centerline. If someone goes into a 30-day treatment center and relapses a few months later, do we hold the same empathy for this person as we do for someone whose cancer reoccurs?
The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism cites three factors that increase the risk for alcohol use disorder:
Drinking at an early age. Those who begin drinking before age 15 are the most at risk. Dad started drinking at age 14.
Genetics and family history. Hereditability accounts for 60%. Eight people in my extended family died from alcohol-related problems.
Mental health and a history of trauma. Risk increases for people with depression, ADHD and PTSD.
Access, genetics and trauma. We stigmatize people who get dealt a bad hand. Do we hold the same disregard for a person who grows up without access to fresh vegetables, has a genetic predisposition to breast cancer and suffers childhood trauma from losing a parent? Access, genetics and trauma. Try saying, 'She's a cancer patient' in the same tone of, 'She's a drunk.' It doesn't work.
Everyone knows someone who misuses alcohol, especially in Wisconsin, the drunkest state. With 28 million alcoholics in the U.S., people function invisibly in every career. According to the Addiction Center, jobs with the highest rates of addiction to alcohol include 20% of lawyers, 16.5% of oil and construction workers, 15% of doctors, 12% of restaurant workers and 10% of priests.
With drinking on the rise among women, there's likely a high percentage for the career called "carpool driver." Because many people with the disease are functioning adults, they live unbothered and invisible until the effects on their body of prolonged and/or excessive drinking show up and also damage those they love.
When Dad lost re-election, my parents reopened their small-town tavern. Customers loved my dad. They remind me how when he laughed, he flicked his head and eyes to the upper right as if joy ran through his body so rapidly, he needed to release it to the atmosphere. They share stories of him throwing their dollar bill in the air and having it stick to the ceiling or how he extravagantly decorated the backbar for holidays.
Mom also drank excessively. She became severely depressed, went through alcohol withdrawal, developed Korsakoff Syndrome and lost her brilliant mind. Dad sought medical care from doctors, hospitals and in-patient facilities to get better. Medication for alcoholism hadn't been invented.
Thirty years ago, it took a colossal amount of willpower to recover. I never gave Dad credit for his effort to get better because he never did. Instead, I abandoned him like his illness commanded him to abandon our family. His alcohol use disorder made it difficult for us to love him. For a time, I hated him. I secretly hurt reading social media posts about wonderful fathers every Father's Day.
It took me 35 years to understand Dad and Mom suffered from a disease, not a moral weakness. Learning to express empathy rather than disgust for those who suffer from the disorder came from intensive self-reflection through therapy and the conclusion that in the game of life, everyone tries. Once I stopped inserting repulsion into the narrative whenever I said, 'My parents were alcoholics,' people's faces softened, and so did my heart.
Alcohol can make a person do bad things, such as drunk driving or domestic abuse. An alcoholic may disappoint, hurt and abandon those they love but their actions and disease do not inherently destroy what initially made many people love them. An understanding and acceptance of alcohol use disorder as a widespread disease is the first step we need to help those we love.
Jane Hillstrom is a former public relations executive. She writes literary nonfiction and is completing a memoir about her childhood growing up in a tavern. She writes on Substack under The Osman Club, her parent's tavern.
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Society doesn't treat alcoholism as disease. We judge drunks | Opinion
