People looking for signs of alcoholism in an individual are often frustrated that there is not some clear-cut model or structure of a therapeutic base that identifies the nature of alcoholism as an illness and as such lets an individual diagnose the alcoholic either in a professional or a personal capacity.
Part of the problem with this lies in the fact that the concept of alcoholism as an illness or a disease is a fairly new one, in a medical sense, and whilst the majority of clinicians and people involved in public health agree that alcoholism is an illness, it is much harder to define what that actually means in practice.
Having said that, anyone living close to or with an alcoholic would probably find it relatively easy if they were in a recovery mode themselves to highlight the nature of alcoholism as it has affected their lives.
It is not simply enough to know that an individual’s drinking is out of control, although that much is normally true and fairly obvious, it also goes to a much deeper sense of an individual’s need to protect their drinking, to hide their drinking, to make other people believe that they don’t have a drink problem and to make people close to them believe that it is their fault if they do.
Signs of alcoholism
It is also fairly natural that someone who is concerned about the fact that someone they know or is close to them may have a drink problem wants to understand the nature of alcoholism in the context of signs of alcoholism in order to see if that individual is an alcoholic and thereby seek appropriate help.
Signs of alcoholism can exist at an early age, many people starts drinking alcoholically in their teens, some even younger.
Such drinking is often written off effectively as being a habit of youth, and for many people this may well be the case. For other people it is a sign that their drinking is essentially out of control even before they start.
The problem is that normally only the individual themselves will know this, and unless there are significant external consequences of drinking at such a young age they are unlikely to recognise it as a problem till much later on in life.
Signs of alcoholism or most probably best understood from an external point of view, in the sense of fairly disastrous consequences behaviours that arise as a result of the persons drinking.
There is a saying in Alcoholics Anonymous addressed to potential members that says if drink is costing you more than money you have a problem.
Whilst that can be quite a wide statement which will normally hit home to an alcoholic who will realise that at some measure their life is out of control as a result of their need to drink and will give them some sense of the vicious cycle that envelops them.