Alcohol is no laughing matter
Alcohol, legal, sociable and currently the third leading cause of preventable death.
Quite a shocking statistic isn’t it? Alcohol will kill 1 in 10 Americans aged 20-64 this year and someone somewhere will die every 10 seconds because of it.
Stop! Think! Process those statistics for a moment.
Time for another shocker? High-risk drinking amongst women has increased by 60% in the last 10yrs and alcohol use disorder has nearly doubled.
And yet we continue to use women as part of alcohol marketing, we make light of yummy mummy’s little tipple at night, we encourage wine and nibbles at Book Clubs – I’ll have a rant about the nibbles and obesity on another occasion! – we are encouraged to laugh at the sight of young women toppling about on high heels, drunk on a night out.
Alcohol advertising specifically targets younger women, slim neat bottles of beer, pink bubbly wines, sexy women swaying on the beach as they mix a rum cocktail, phallically shaped bottles for glugging after a workout.
Now, come on, time to face the truth. We are normalising risky drinking behaviours. We are normalising daily drinking when we are bombarded with health advice that more than one drink a day for a woman, is risky due to the difference in how we metabolise alcohol. We get conflicting messages telling us that red wine is good for us, wine in pregnancy is good for the foetus, blah blah blah. The internet is increasingly being used to promote humour and alcohol use to women through social media, deliberating targeting us and giving an image of liberation and spontaneity; and have you tried to buy a birthday or greetings card for a friend/relative that doesn’t drink? Jokes are being made at our expense, jokes about something that is killing us and normalizing addiction.
We would be horrified to view active drug use on our tv’s, PC’s and tablets and yet we consider the legal excessive use of alcohol, which is proving to be so much more dangerous than opiates into our homes daily and viewed by our children.
Really? Really are we so stupid, so naïve that we can be manipulated so easily?
We need to role model to our young women healthy behaviour around alcohol, we are being watched and increasingly we are seeing larger numbers of women being admitted to rehab – national statistics state twice as likely.. twice!!! This is scary
Check out the NACOA (National Assoc for Children of Alcoholics) work recently highlighting the children’s views of their lives with alcohol. Its gut-wrenchingly painful reading and I know as I have personal experience.
We need to stand up and say Enough, no more, time for action; 3 million deaths worldwide annually, no more.
Amanda Thomas.
from Western Counselling https://www.westerncounselling.com/blog/addiction-2/alcohol/can-i-recover/
via Alcohol
