Alcoholism in America
Hook! (1250) America is known for having their freedom and that’s why we have such a big number of Alcoholics. However, those alcoholics do not know how severe it is every time they decide to pick up a bottle. Alcoholism may lead to domestic abuse, memory loss, and death.
Alcohol and Domestic Abuse
When you drink alcohol you lose control of your mind and possibly your body. That can make you do some ignorant things. For instance like abusing someone in your household, and that even means punching or pushing that person. Bellafante found research that in the 19th century there was several women who came up forward about temperance. They did that because they had enough of their spouses coming home from a saloon and raising a fist to them. That is probably the most common kind of domestic abuse there is. The sad thing is that the wives or even girlfriends will stay with them because they believe that it is true love.
The worst kind of domestic abuse is when things get out of hand and someone is murdered. The Bureau of Justice did a study about domestic abuse and alcohol. They discovered “ more than half of defendants accused of murdering a spouse had been drinking at the time the murder occured”. (Bellafante) The justice department also found out that “two-thirds of victims who had endured violence from a partner reported that the partner had been drinking at the time of the attack” Alcohol can make a certain person become aggressive. The alcohol’s chemicals affect your brain’s chemicals and changes your judgement of character. It changes it to a point where one might hate the person that they supposedly “love”.
There was one incident on a New York piece that caused a male named Mr. Schneiderman to resign from his office. Bellafante also stated that Mr. Schneiderman was being accused of drinking excessively and physically abusing four women that he was dating. Once again the four women believe that he is an alcoholic. In fact one accuser said that Mr. Schneiderman “would almost always drink 2 bottles of wine in a night, then one bottle of scotch in the bedroom. He would get absolutely plastered five nights out of seven.” she continues to say “he literally fell on his face in my kitchen, straight down like a tree falling. His attacks would follow”. (Bellafante)
Alcohol itself is not the problem to domestic abuse or just abusive people in general. It depends on how the person who chooses to drink, acts upon it. Although more than half that drinks alcohol probably is abusive.
Memory Loss
On another note binge drinking of alcohol has a high rate of memory loss. Rather its short term or long term, alcohol effects what is developed in your brain. The University of Oxford done a study about moderate to heavy drinkers and how alcohol affects their brain. Oxford gave them a minute to name as many words as they could beginning with a certain letter. They did this as a language fluency test to see how quick their brain could respond. The results was “the heaviest drinkers were most likely to have clear shrinkage of a part of the brain called the hippocampus, a change that can precede or accompany dementia”. (Painter) That was for heavy drinkers but moderate drinkers almost had no difference. “Even moderate drinkers were three times more likely than abstainers to show hippocampal shrinkage”. (Painter) So even moderate drinkers, which is drinking about 3-4 glasses of alcohol a day, was not safe from brain problems.
Alcohol plays a role in your memory depending on the amount of time that has gone by. When someone wakes up from a night of excessively drinking, they will not remember details of what happened that night. They might recall doing or saying certain things, but its all just a fuzzy blur. A psychology professor said that “when people experience blackouts, they have ‘gaps’ in their memories that they then try to piece together to create a personal narrative. To reconstruct what they don’t remember, people many use factual information, as well as how they believe that an event should have happened.” (Howard) That’s what alcoholics will do to try to cover up their problem.
Putting your brain through all of that difficulty, would cause some serious problems. After awhile your brain will be developed to slurring words and thinking slowly. So slow that you might have the possibility of dementia. All of this just because you wanted to have a “fun” night.
Risks of Alcohol-Related Death
Last, but not least alcohol has the power to cause death.. According to a study in the journal “The Lancet”, “Alcohol is the highest risk factor for disease and premature death in mean and women between the ages of 15 and 49 worldwide”. (LaMotte) In 2016 there was 2.8 million deaths that was associated with alcohol. The rate has probably just gone up higher since then.
There is not much to say or explain about how being an alcoholic can cause death, because it is self explanatory. All that I have mentioned so far can result in death. During domestic abuse the partner being abusive, in most cases, will kill the other partner. Memory loss can turn out to be dementia and that is one way to die. When a person blacks out they have no control over their mind and if at a high location they might fall off. Drinking big amounts in a short period of time can given a person alcohol poisoning. Most people do not survive alcohol poisoning. “Alcohol overuse remains a persistent public health problem and is responsible for more deaths, as many as 88,00 per year”. (Glaser) That is only in America, and that’s a pretty big indent in our population.
One could argue that having a drink a day is better for your health and won’t do any damage. However, what this argument fails to consider is that moderate drinking over time will only make your health worse. ‘At no point… is there a level of consumption that appears to lower the overall risk of developing any of the wide array of diseases investigated to comparison of non-drinkers.” (LaMotte)
