Dying for a drink
Published in GALWAYnow and CORKnow November 2007
So you’re not 21 anymore. You have a mortgage, you’re getting engaged, getting married, having kids or furthering your career. You’re moving on, everything’s changing, except for one thing - your drinking, writes Jo Lavelle.
In your early 20s, going out and getting into the obligatory drunken stupor was not just ok; it was totally acceptable. But now you’re drinking just as much, if not more, it’s having an increasing negative impact on your life and the guilt is setting in. One of the biggest faux pas in Irish society is to tell someone just how much of a fool they made of themselves the night before. It’s not done – you don’t want to cause them any more damage than the hangover’s already doing.
But ignoring it is just what’s adding fuel to an already out of control fire says Joe Treacy, Alcohol Addiction Counsellor with the HSE (Health Service Executive) West, Galway who suggests that the city is now facing an epidemic of female binge drinking – and it’s impacting on our health, our children, our relationships and our careers. “It was a taboo to find a woman in treatment ten to 15 years ago. I remember being in treatment settings with nine men and maybe one woman and usually, she was very well advanced. There was a reluctance to engage women into treatment in the past. It’s a macho thing; like it’s ok for men to go to the pub. But women tend to drink at home, secretly and that prevails all the time. In our last treatment programme here, we had five women and six men – the taboo is gone. You didn’t see that ten years ago. It’s a rarity now for a woman not to drink and they try to drink on a par with their male counterparts. They can do it successfully for a time but because of women’s bodily functions, they are more susceptible to liver damage and that’s what we’re seeing,” states Treacy. He blames the increase in binge-drinking in women on the increased stresses and pressures of today. “The stress of women is incredible. It leaves me breathless when I ask a woman to describe her working day. I’m suddenly realising that she has a day’s work done before she arrives into work. I’m continually amazed with what women are trying to juggle in their lifestyles. Women are working like dogs and they’re wrecked before their time. They’re stressed up to their eyeballs, trying to juggle work and home life.”
One of the main fall-outs of binge drinking is the number of children being taken into care due to their mother’s drinking. “Sadly enough, a lot of the women that are referred here are referred due to childcare issues. Somebody has noticed that a child’s behaviour has changed, a child goes missing, or a teenager is reacting at home and suddenly it comes out that it’s mum’s drinking. Women feel very aggrieved about this - they’re saying, ‘Why point the finger at me? They have a dad as well.’ But women are the main refuge of children, particularly small children - nobody does it better than mum. It’s very, very extreme to remove children and the HSE goes to extraordinary lengths to keep children at home. The fact that it’s happening is a testament to how severe the problem is.
“The amount of children in this health board being taken into care because of parental drinking is dramatically increasing every month and every year. We didn’t see that five years ago; home alone, children wandering the streets, the case of the child wandering around the Eyre Square Centre, deliberately abandoned by his mother who was drinking, children being locked in Isuzu jeeps one race week when guards had to
break in.”
Another major effect that binge drinking is having on women in the city is that their sexual health is being put at serious risk, states Treacy. “We’ve had a large degree of unreported aggravated sexual behaviour directed at women in Galway because
they’re drunk. Many women have said they didn’t report it because they just didn’t want the embarrassment or the hassle that goes with it. We’re now referring women to sexual health clinics because of their drinking; that’s a growing phenomenon. There’s a predatory nature in the city – men in nightclubs are watching girls getting drunk. Spiking of women’s drinks is a phenomena that has attracted much attention. In instances where women said their drinks were spiked in Galway, we found no substances, but found that their concentrates of alcohol would knock a horse out, let alone themselves. We saw 900 people last year and still haven’t got a sample to say the date rape drug was in their drink.”
Treacy also suggests that Galway could be the highest dispenser of the morning after pill in the country. “If there’s a festival or a party, there’s an increase in the number of women requesting the morning after pill, which is their right, but it’s an indicator of the level of recklessness or carelessness. We have an all-year round drinking festival.”
While alcohol-related problems are evidently on the rise, women are still reluctant to seek treatment due to a sense of shame and it usually takes some kind of catalyst for a woman to seek help for an alcohol problem. Treacy says that it can be something from a minor road traffic accident, to presenting at work with a smell of alcohol from the night before or relationship problems. It can be childcare issues, or it can just
be a blood sample which shows high levels of alcohol in the blood. “Women are sometimes totally unaware of the units of alcohol that are acceptable. They are amazed that their limit should be 14 units a week – a unit is a glass of wine or a half of Guinness. If you’re a woman and you go to your GP and say you’re depressed, they’re a hundred times more likely to give you an antidepressant than they would a man. We’re saying that GPs should certainly be listening more. There’s a somewhat
quiet apprehension in engaging a woman and saying, ‘What about your alcohol consumption?’ Because the attitude is, if she presents well and looks well, leave her alone.” Treacy adds that while our cultural attitude to alcohol needs to be
looked at, another major factor in the rise in binge drinking and alcohol-related problems is the huge amount of money being spent on advertising by the drinks industry. “By international standards, Ireland has major problems with alcohol. We
spend €150 million a day on alcohol and the cost continues to rise. The implications are massive from a health perspective, particularly in women as it encroaches on every aspect of their lives.”
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