Abstract
Lord Stephen Taylor of Harlow, speaking in the House of Lords in 1965, recalled that he once knew a French GP who was ‘much mystified by the English disease of the “nervous breakdown”’. The friend had observed: ‘We do not have this in France. En France c’est l’alcoholisme (In France it is alcoholism)’.1 By the mid 1960s, concerns about alcohol abuse among industrial workers emerged in a number of international studies about psychological illness, driven largely, as the previous chapter has illustrated, by concerns about sickness absence in industry. A study of Australian male telegraphists, for example, drew explicit attention to the inter-relationship between sickness absence, drinking, gastritis and peptic ulcer. Drawing a direct association between drinking and neurosis, the author argued that the subsequent ‘physical consequences of drinking to excess no doubt contributed to the liability of the drinker to be absent repeatedly’.2 As with much of the research on this topic, nonetheless, there was no clear consensus when it came to deciding whether the alcohol abuse was caused initially by the worker’s constitution, or by the pressures of any personal or professional problems he might be experiencing. Research papers from the Netherlands articulated similar difficulties. A follow-up study of male alcoholics undertaken by clinicians at a treatment centre in Groningen proposed that troubles and conflicts in the marital and family sphere were usually present in patients; however, these conflicts were ‘dependent on the pathological drinking – either being caused by it or, if present before, being intensified by it’.3
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Notes
David Ferguson, ‘Some characteristics of repeated sickness absence’, British Journal of Industrial Medicine (1972), 29, 420–31, on 430.
W. K. van Dijk and A. van Dijk-offeman, ‘A follow-up study of 211 treated male alcoholics’, British Journal of Addiction (1973), 68, 3–24, on 4.
V. Berridge ‘Editorial, the centenary issue’, British Journal of Addiction (1984), 79, 1–6, on 4.
V. Berridge, ‘The impact of war 1914–1918’, British Journal of Addiction (1990), 85, 1017–22, on 1017.
Betsy Thom, Dealing with Drink, Alcohol and Social Policy, from Treatment to Management (London, Free Association Books, 1999) p. 15. Thom cautions that although there have been broad shifts in explanatory models, differing perceptions have continued to co-exist. Current disease theories are still contested.
See, for example, S. Peele, ‘Addiction as a disease: Policy, epidemiology and treatment consequences of a bad idea’, in J. Henningfield, W. Bickel and P. Santora (eds), Addiction Treatment in the 21st Century: Science and Policy Issues (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins, 2007), pp. 153–63.
V. Berridge, ‘The 1940s and 1950s: The rapprochement of psychology and biochemistry’, British Journal of Addiction (1990), 85, 1037–52, on 1042.
V. Berridge, ‘The society from the 1960s to the 1980s’, British Journal of Addiction (1990), 85, 1053–66, on 1060.
E. M. Jellinek, ‘Phases of alcohol addiction’, Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol (1952), 13 (4), 673–84.
Conversation with Max Glatt, British Journal of Addiction (1983), 78, 231–43, on 233.
G. Prys Williams and M. M. Glatt, ‘The incidence of (long-standing) alcoholism in England and Wales’, British Journal of Addiction to Alcohol and Other Drugs (1966), 61, 257–68.
See also W. B. Morrell, ‘The Steering Group on Alcoholism of the Rowntree Trust’, British Journal of Addiction to Alcohol and Other Drugs (1966), 61, 295–9.
John Greenaway, Drink and British Politics since 1830 (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan 2003), p. 164.
M. Bennett, ‘Drinking as a career’, Journal of Alcoholism (1976), 11 (4), 150–2, on 151.
For a psychiatric appraisal, see G. A. Foulds and Christine Hassall, ‘The significance of age of onset of excessive drinking in male alcoholics’, British Journal of Psychiatry (1969), 115, 1027–32. Although social aspects such as childhood and marriage were considered, the authors of this retrospective study of alcoholics correlated alcoholism and problems in the interpersonal sphere as evidence of personality disorder and neurosis.
M. M. Glatt, ‘A treatment centre for alcoholics in a public mental hospital: Its establishment and working’, British Journal of Addiction (1955), 52, 55–88, 60, 61.
A. B. Sclare, ‘The female alcoholic’, British Journal of Addiction (1970), 65, 99–107.
Denis Parr, ‘Alcoholism in general practice’, British Journal of Addiction (1957) 54, 1, 25–39, on 39.
R. M. Murray, ‘Alcoholism and employment’, Journal of Alcoholism (1975), 10 (1), 23–6 on 25.
K. J. B. Rix, D. Hunter and P. C. Olley, ‘Incidence of treated alcoholism in north-east Scotland, Orkney and Shetland fishermen, 1966–1970’, British Journal of Industrial Medicine (1982), 39, 11–17, on 11.
M. M. Glatt, ‘The key role of the family doctor in the rehabilitation of the alcoholic’, Journal of the College of General Practitioners (1960), 3, 292–300, on 292.
H. J. Walton, ‘Effect of the doctor’s personality on his style of practice’, Journal of the Royal College of General Practitioners (1969), 17 (82, supplement 3), 6–17.
N. H. Rathod, ‘An enquiry into general practitioners’ opinions about alcoholism’, British Journal of Addiction (1967), 62, 103–11, on 109.
David Robinson, ‘Alcoholism as a social fact: Notes on the sociologist’s viewpoint in relation to a proposed study of referral behaviour’, British Journal of Addiction (1973), 68, 91–7, on 97, 94.
Herbert Berger, ‘The prevention of alcoholism’, British Journal of Addiction (1963), 59, 47–54.
Kenneth Robinson, ‘Talk at the annual dinner of the society’, British Journal of Addiction (1963), 60, 6–7, on 6.
See for example, W. A. Fransen, ‘The social worker’s contribution in the care of alcoholics’, British Journal of Addiction (1964) 60, 65–80,
and Thorbjorn Kjolstad, ‘Psychotherapy of alcoholics’, British Journal of Addiction (1965), 61, 35–49.
R. Lemle and M. E. Mishkind, ‘Alcohol and masculinity’, Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment, 6 (1989), 213–22.
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Haggett, A. (2015). Men, Alcohol and Coping. In: A History of Male Psychological Disorders in Britain, 1945–1980. Mental Health in Historical Perspective. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137448880_4
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