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Doctors would scarcely touch them (many still refuse to treat them), and the law looked upon them as human vermin who had to be swept off the streets and thrown into drunk tanks. Old attitudes still persist, but within the past five years there has been a remarkable change in prognosis. No miracle cure, no equivalent of the Salk vaccine is in sight for the alcoholic, and none is ever likely to be found; but for every one of the many alcoholisms there is at least one treatment or combination of treatments that offers a good chance of cure.
The common element in most of the cures is group support. Explains Jim Bryan, director of therapy at Chit Chat Farms, a highly successful alcoholic treatment center west of Reading, Pa.. "We tell the patients it can be done, and you don't have to do it alone. The patients help each other get well." Half the staff—including Bryan himself—are recovered alcoholics, providing even more credence to the support they give to patients during Chit Chat's 28-day, $840 treatment. "We do not look into the whys of their drinking," says Bryan, "but how they can stop."
No In-Depth Therapy. At Lutheran General Hospital northwest of Chicago, where the treatment runs 21 days and costs $1,827, there is also an emphasis on interaction between patients and staff and among the patients themselves. For most patients, there is no in-depth therapy. "We're off this kick of using psychotherapy," says Medical Director Dr. Nelson Bradley, a psychiatrist, echoing the general opinion of experts that classical psychoanalysis is of limited help for most alcoholics.
The patient at Lutheran General is treated for withdrawal symptoms —which can range from the shakes and hallucinations to convulsions and fullblown DTs—and given a medical assessment during his first five days. On the sixth day he is assigned to one of three 25-patient teams. They meet three times a week—in many cases with wives, husbands, children and even employers—in sessions designed to bring the alcoholic back into society through lectures, educational films and discussions about drinking problems. Lutheran General follows up its patients for two or three months, some of them with psychotherapy, and it estimates its success at about 50% after three years. "Beyond 50%," says Bradley, "you've got to have the involvement of the family and the employers. Then the success rate can go as high as 80%."
A variant of the Lutheran General and Chit Chat models is the treatment center that combines group therapy and hypnotic suggestion with a behavioristic kind of aversion treatment: electric shocks or drugs to make the very odor of liquor abhorrent. At Seattle's Schick's Shadel Hospital, which offers an eleven-day, $1,500 program, each patient is taken to "Duffy's Tavern," a small room decorated with enough bottles of whisky to lubricate a regiment. The patient is given a nausea-inducing shot and then handed a glass of his favorite brand. He sniffs the aroma, takes a sip and swirls it around in his mouth. Then, sickened, he spits it out into a handy container.