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At 2 am on the 1st of June 1975 at the end of a two or three-day bender, I drank myself sober. This is a scary place for an alcoholic to be when alcohol isn’t working for you anymore. I saw that I had three choices:
- I could kill myself, if only I knew a way to do it so that it wouldn’t affect my family.
- I could use other drugs as well as alcohol. I’d had a little flirt with some three years earlier and they were so good that it scared me and I ran away from that group of people but remembered the feelings. I knew if I went down this path it wouldn’t be very long before I did try to kill myself.
- I could get some help, thinking I needed a psychiatrist.
The next morning my first thought was “it wasn’t as bad as I thought it was” and then I looked in the mirror, it was, and I think vanity got me to get some help. I went to see my doctor to get a referral to a psychiatrist. My regular doctor wasn’t on duty, and I saw his partner. I was glad about this as my doctor had given me Valium once before and after the first week they didn’t work, and I threw them out and had another drink as I didn’t want to get hooked on pills as a friend had.
This new doctor said he would decide if I needed to see a psychiatrist and tell him my problems. I did and they were many and varied and to this day I don’t remember a single one of them. After telling him he asked if I drank very much. I said, “Oh no not very much”. He said how much. I replied maybe a bottle of wine a day. That would be the minimum I would drink in any day. He then wanted to know when I did this drinking as I had just told him I was working two jobs and that was from 8 am to 11 pm. It was in answering him that I started drinking after the second job and drank until I flaked out, and saw that there wasn’t anything social about this drinking.
He then suggested that we take the alcohol out of my life for three months and see if I didn’t have a different attitude to all my problems if not then he would send me to see a psychiatrist. He said I was to get in touch with AA that day, which I agreed to. Some weeks later I went back to him and asked why he sent me to AA, and he told me that a big proportion of their practice were alcoholics and that they couldn’t do anything to help them, remember this was 1975.
Some six months later and going to AA, without a drink or drug in me I still wanted to kill myself. I had just stopped working the second job and didn’t know what to do with myself. I didn’t want to drink so I took myself to a well know psychiatric clinic to be in a safe place. I did get to see a psychiatrist and she said I needed damn good holiday, but I wasn’t in a fit state to have a holiday by myself.
She admitted me into another facility for 2 weeks. She diagnosed that I was manic depressive, and in a follow-up appointment said she knew I didn’t want to take medications, so she sent me to a psychologist to get some help with living skills. This worked very well for me as I had grown up as the eldest child in an alcoholic family and missed a lot of learning that others received.
After going to AA for ten years, I wrote a letter to the doctor’s practice in Cremorne, even though I couldn’t remember the doctor’s name, to say how grateful I was for the help given to me and how my life was progressing normally. In my family, I have come to see a lot of alcoholism some treated and some untreated.
I have not needed any medical assistance for a manic depressive diagnosis made when I was in very early recovery from alcoholism. 48 years later I’m still very grateful for the help the medical profession gave me.
