How Can I Help an Alcoholic?

Putting up with what we perceive as weakness in the one we love or have a relationship to can be frustrating. We can help an alcoholic by not allowing his addiction to make us feel not loved enough for him to quit drinking. The first step in helping an alcoholic is to find him the kind of therapeutic help to understand why he is using alcohol to self medicate. If the alcoholic is using alcohol as a kind of medication, his treatment should be to consider alcoholism as a secondary diagnosis and his psychological problem whether depression or other primary diagnosis as the main focus of treatment of how to help them stop drinking.

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Treating the alcoholics depression with anti depressants can work, and those living with the alcoholic can help by making sure that he doe not mix the two drugs. Another way that we can help an alcoholic is to change his mental health provider. If the alcoholic is targeted as an alcoholic, he will be taken off anti depressants, even if they work, by his counselor. The alcoholic will then be faced with his depression, no medication and his diagnosis of being an alcoholic. He will relapse. We can help an alcoholic by changing his mental health counselor and giving his new counselor just his symptoms to make a diagnosis.

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It might sound confusing, but once a person is designated as an alcoholic, his treatment options become limited as far as how to help an alcoholic concerning group therapies and counselors who perceive in him a weakness to alcohol that is both biological and emotional. The alcoholic as a person who is too weak to stop drinking is not just a stereotype for late night comedy shows. Helping an alcoholic is much like finding the missing link in his behavioral patterns that can explain why he is drinking and to find a substitute to the alcohol until he can handle the cause of his needing to blur his hold on his reality.

Like many other mental disorders that can be helped with the elimination of the drug substance, alcoholics can be helped by a change in environment and friends. Talk therapy helps if the therapist is willing to drop her pre conditioned mind set that the alcoholic is depressed because of the need for alcohol working on his brain and can think about the situations he is relating that led him to begin to drink to mitigate the pain of depression caused by a situation or organic depression. If alcohol can be seen as a cure and not a cause for depression, one can help an alcoholic by finding a therapist who is willing to give the alcoholic a diagnosis that can allow his underlying mental health problem to be treated.

Good luck

How Can I Help an Alcoholic?

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