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I have heard of a high rate of incidence between alcoholism and mental illness, especially depression and bipolar disorder. Does anyone have any knowledge or experience of this or do you think it may simply be a coincidence. My binge A has been diagnosed with Depression and has been prescribed medication, he hopes this may help his binging.
My A is bipolar, PTSD, anxiety, depression diagnosed. I know when he was taking the Klonopin, it would trigger drinking episodes. He'd take a pill, wait 10 minutes or so and if he thought it wasn't working take another, then I'd blink and he'd be off to the beer store. So I would make sure to do research on the meds that he is prescribed, an AA member said mine shouldn't have been on Klonopin to begin with as he is an addict and Klonopin is a narcotic. Make sure his doctor knows that he's alcoholic so he's not prescribed something that's even worse than booze. Mine has since been taken off the Klonopin and is now taking Neurotin. He's been on it for almost 2 months and only pulled a drunk once, course it was an awful drunk and he's sitting in jail for it now.
Good question, I seem to think there's a link. With having the mental disorder, it seems the drinking is a coping mechanism so they don't have to deal with reality.
Take care,
FOTB
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Remember yesterday, Dream of tomorrow, Live for today.
Many mental health facilties have what is called MICA units. Mentally Ill Chemical Abusers.
I know because my wife has been in those programs.
I'm not sure if alcoholism is a mental illness or is used by addicts to numb the effects of their mental illness. Kinda chicken or the egg though.
The worst part is that the inpatient units don't communicate with the outpatient units. My wife was in outpatient MICA. She was almost going to get send away to rehab. She tries to commit suicide and goes inpatient. Today's inpatient model is the drug the living crap out of you to stabalize you and then release you cause the insurance company wants your stay as short as possible. Quite often this leads to multiple short to medium term stays. Then what happened was, they meds they had my wife on upon relase back to the MICA program, no alcohol treatment and detox center would take her because she was on Klonopin, etc. The MICA unit was pissed to say the least.
The mental healthcare system in this country are in shambles. The total disregard for the family which is the environment that patient is being released back to, and the total lack of support by many if not most facilities is unphathomable. I had mental healtcare workers working for me and guiding me through the process and me, my wife and my family were still getting screwed.
AA/Alanon is free except for the literatue and pass the basket and seems to get to the root problems and causes of our issues. What I like is that we learn ways to deal with our systems while examining what is causing them, so that we can change those things in ourselves that we can.
Bob
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You are a perfect child of God and God and I love you just the way you are! (added by me...in that special alanon way)
My vote, for what is worth, is yes, I think there's a link. My Dad (A and pill abuser) was diagnosed and treated for depression and remained depressed (and using) for I would guess 30-40 years. When he finally was weaned off of all his pills, it turned out he was bipolar. Diagnosed in his 70s. My FIL (A) also has bipolar. Two thoughts I've had on this-- one, that maybe having these symptoms w/o treatment leads to abuse. The second is more a chicken and egg-- is the mental illness there first, leading to abuse or does the abuse lead to the mental illness?
Alcoholics can be dual-diagonsed. That is, have a mental illness and alcoholism. In this case, they may use the alcohol to medicate the effects of mental illness. This does not work, of course. But, mentally ill alcoholics some times go untreated because the alcoholism is the "presenting issue" and for this reason, the mental illness is not diagonsed and treated.
I brought that same question up about a year ago to a counselor. I had been reading and had seen some similarities in my husband and a few psycological issues. The counselor basically said unless the alcoholism is being treated, treating the other things usually doesn't work.
He said many facilities had dual diagnosis programs, and he said they concentrate on the drinking first.
