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Alcohol-related deaths spiked during the pandemic, a study shows

194 points| horseradish | 4 years ago |nytimes.com | reply

292 comments

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[+] kaishiro|4 years ago|reply
My older brother is an alcoholic. I suspect it's somewhat cliche to say, but when he's sober he's the nicest guy I know - almost nobody else I'd rather spend time with - and when he's drunk, he's chaos.

The past few years he's been really struggling with sobriety - on and off like a roller coaster. The pandemic was an absolute nightmare for someone like him - in between jobs, trying to stay sober, trying to find the right balance of anti-depressants and anti-anxiety meds, and all with a limited budget and shitty health insurance.

It breaks my heart that I can't do it for him.

[+] sjg007|4 years ago|reply
Has he tried antabuse or something like that? Those pills make you vomit when you drink and are quite effective in harnessing the body's natural anti-poison response system to curb drinking.
[+] loceng|4 years ago|reply
Has he looked into, researched Ayahuasca yet? Legal in many places now including Canada, and plenty of anecdotal evidence that it helps break addictions/dependancies.
[+] spurgu|4 years ago|reply
Tell him to try kratom if he hasn't.
[+] Epiphany21|4 years ago|reply
Recently (within the last two years) I had to help someone suffering with alcoholism/DTS and I was horrified by the abysmal outpatient support the medical system here provides. If he didn't have health insurance and a ride I would not have been able to convince him to go, and he could have died.

It's very hard to argue with his contempt for hospitals and doctors when all they do is give you an overpriced potassium IV (very painful) then push you out the door and tell you to find an AA group.

I don't even know what the solution is, but I do know the current way of doing things is inadequate and probably getting a ton of people killed. It's very sad.

[+] ascar|4 years ago|reply
I'm not sure what can be done here. Having had a very close relative (as close as it gets, but I don't wanna associate anything precise publicly) being an alcoholic for decades, watching them succumb, degenerate and eventually die over a long and horrifying period, I don't see how the medical system can be the solution to this problem.

The motivation to stop drinking and continue to stop drinking has to be mostly intrinsic. There can be additional extrinsic factors (like doing it for your family) strengthening the intrinsic motivation, but without a strong and constant inner will to stop nothing will.

My relative took the final bottle of Whiskey on a lonely Christmas day. It took 2 months of suffering before it finally ended for good. No medical system can prevent the loneliness and dark times. And relatives also have their own lifes.

Addiction is a terrible problem and it's great that there is help for the persons motivated to seek help, and AA is a good initiative for that. But not everyone can be helped.

[+] dazc|4 years ago|reply
I have a friend in the UK, similar situation. After years of receiving no help I took it upon myself to figure out what was causing his self-sabotaging behaviour. I can't say I made any great discoveries other than figuring out his trigger points and devising strategies to avoid them.

Obviously everyone is going to be different but my friend's issues stem from being lonely and isolated a lot of the time. Simply me being around for a couple of days a week has helped. He still drinks but in a much more controlled manner and, ironically, I found that ensuring he always has a supply at home has helped with this too. It's taken away the constant panic in his mind - for want of a better explanation.

[+] matwood|4 years ago|reply
I've dealt with an alcoholic for almost my entire life. Unless that person decides to stop, there is nothing a hospital (or anyone else) can do. It's sad and it's hard, but it's the reality.
[+] ejb999|4 years ago|reply
>>then push you out the door and tell you to find an AA group.

What is it exactly you want the hospital to do if your friend won't stop drinking?

[+] starkd|4 years ago|reply
The sad reality is that they roll them out the door like that with suggestions to find an AA group is that there really is no other solution. ER staff are busy and can use their time more wisely by helping the ones they can help. We like to throw a lot of money at rehab facilities, but even those have very poor track records. The most cost effective treatment is to prevent people from getting into that situation in the first place.
[+] saiya-jin|4 years ago|reply
I think the issue is mismatched expectations. General, ie university hospitals are normally not a place to treat addictions of any kind. You have rehab clinics, psychologists, AAs, church for those who need such authority and so on. These tend to be on their own, separate, not in hospital.

Emergency services is set to treat physical damage to the body, not psychological issues of any kind.

[+] CyanDeparture|4 years ago|reply
A potassium IV should not be painful in the sligtest, it should just be a tiny pin prick when it's going in. Something went wrong if that was hurting.
[+] hackeraccount|4 years ago|reply
I am so glad I got married and had a kid. My wife doesn't drink - and honestly it's way less fun to drink - even have a glass of wine with a meal - when someone else isn't. Plus with my daughter I don't drink when my wife isn't around because I'm always worried something is going to come up and I'll have to drive her some place on short notice.

I think if it were just me on my own I might drink more ... and I always kind of worry that I'd get a taste for not the drink but just that mellow relaxed feel no pain that comes with 2 or 3 drinks. That's trouble for me I think.

[+] AlwaysRock|4 years ago|reply
I used to drink alone because I was bored. I used to drink socially because everyone, or it seemed like everyone, was doing it. Ones partners drinking habits can have a huge impact on ones own drinking habits.
[+] after_care|4 years ago|reply
Always having meals with the same people, being consistently worried you’ll be responsible to drop what you’re doing on short notice to drive someone. I’m glad I did not marry or have kids.
[+] shrikant|4 years ago|reply
Is this some glitch in the Matrix? I could swear I saw this exact post on the front page a couple of days back, with at least a couple of the exact same comments! What even is happening!

Edit: No, it's either a bug in HN, or the post's been bumped for visibility. Screenshot of a search I did just about now: https://i.imgur.com/Sr1S3eB.png

Edit edit: Actually, could be a bug too, the relative and absolute timestamps on the post and comments don't match at all! :-O

[+] chockchocschoir|4 years ago|reply
Probably just part of the "Second-Change" initiative.

> HN's second-chance pool is a way to give links a second chance at the front page. Moderators and a small number of reviewers go through old submissions looking for articles that are in the spirit of the site—gratifying intellectual curiosity—and which seem like they might interest the community. These get put into a hopper from which software randomly picks one every so often and lobs it randomly onto the lower part of the front page. If it interests the community, it gets upvoted and discussed; if not, it falls off.

- Show HN: Second-Chance Pool (news.ycombinator.com) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308

- https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[+] _Microft|4 years ago|reply
That's the second chance pool in action. If the moderators think that a submission looks good but it didn't gain traction, they might put it into this pool to be offered a second chance. You can inspect the pool here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/pool

[+] stef25|4 years ago|reply
Right before the first lockdown I started a new high stress job and for several months our two toddlers weren't allowed to attend school. During the first few weeks we tried to make it "fun", I'd start working around 4-5AM , alternating morning and evening shifts of work / toddlers with my partner.

Then colleagues started complaining "wtf this guy's playing with his kids in the park at 2PM" and I got really bad feedback from my manager. He'd tell me full of glee that "certain colleagues" went to complain behind my back.

And since then it was non stop screaming at the kids, my partner ... it was hell. I'm not even ashamed to admit I was opening bottles of wine at 10AM and downing them in 30 min.

When the wife & kids went abroad for a week to stay with her parents and I took a week off from work I didn't even drink a drop of alcohol. It was purely to cope with the stress, for which alcohol does work very well! But it was a truly horrible time. And IMHO if you weren't at home with toddlers you didn't experience true suffering.

Ten months in to the job I got laid off and spent a year basically doing nothing apart from be there for the kids and the household.

Since then I did however develop bad sleeping habits and I still tend to wake up at 3-4AM to start work, which I actually enjoy if it wasn't for the fact you're destroyed as from late afternoon.

It's been a really rough 2 years. And I really enjoyed the 5 minutes between the pandemic and WWIII.

[+] TaylorAlexander|4 years ago|reply
Somewhat by chance, I quit alcohol around March 15, 2020 a few days before our first lockdown. I haven't had a drink since. It was just the right time for me, but I am VERY happy I was not still drinking during all those difficult times.
[+] chrisjc|4 years ago|reply
Sort of similar experience...

Not that I was heavy drinker in the first place, but something strange related to alcohol started to happened to me during lockdown/covid. The very thought or taste of alcohol makes me sick and if I do drink, I am out of commission for several days. And I talking about just a single beer or a neat whiskey.

Perhaps it's related to being in the same location 24/7? Perhaps I have less anxiety because I don't have to deal with people in person as much? Perhaps I'm subconsciously aware/appreciative of how fortunate/privileged I am given the situation? It's been rough, but I know others are struggling and seek solace and tranquility in their insobriety. Perhaps I just outgrew alcohol?

I used to like enjoying a beer after a long day at work or during recreation. Two years on, I simply don't miss it at all.

I hope that anyone dealing with this struggle and disease can find the strength, support and help they (and their families and friends) need to fight this demon.

[+] bluedino|4 years ago|reply
I quit at the start of 2020 as well. But we had a kid on the way and I'm not sure how I'd mix that with drinking.
[+] Melatonic|4 years ago|reply
Not surprised at all to hear this - there was a period (maybe a few months into the initial lockdown) I was regularly hearing my neighbours completely lose their shit on a regular basis. Not even the same people either - random, different people each time.

WFH + high stress + forced close proximity + drunkenness is a recipe for disaster

[+] rnk|4 years ago|reply
The whole world that stayed home is stressed, depressed, not recovered. This includes high functioning adults, kids, teenagers. I am in this group as is most of my friends.
[+] AlwaysRock|4 years ago|reply
Arguments went up in my household. Part of it was we realized there were a lot of annoying little things that forced close proximity brought to light the other part was increased irritability from drinking way more.

Once I stopped drinking the arguments went back to a normal level or maybe a little below. Not waking up hungover on a Saturday really makes the weekend nicer.

[+] geden|4 years ago|reply
I stopped drinking during the pandemic. I think for good. I wasn't drinking much. A bottle of wine or two at the weekend with my wife. Never really liked beer that much. It's hard to articulate exactly why I stopped

I think there was some sort of insight into how boring and mechanical it had become, how little I was gaining from it, the drip drip negative effect it had on my body and crucially, how my drinking enabled and encouraged others to drink.

Me continuing to drink was also making me feel morally very queasy when I personally knew two people who drank themselves to death. Not close friends. Both close enough for it to sting. One of them was an incredible talented music producer and a great loss to the world.

It's a very shit drug. The only reason I ever started drinking was to be inside the 'in' group and to have fun with friends.

It's abundantly clear now that alcohol isn't necessary for that at my age.

The only downside has been watching with crystal clarity how boring and dull when intoxicated people become at gatherings.

Better drugs for inhibited teenagers please. Microdosed kombucha for the win.

[+] sokoloff|4 years ago|reply
I switched almost entirely over to non-alcoholic beer in pandemic. It wasn't particularly health or problem related, but just that I like the taste of beer, but don't need the alcohol and two real beers would leave me slightly hungover/tired the next day while NA beers don't.
[+] AlwaysRock|4 years ago|reply
Yup. If you take out social pressure the "benefits" of booze are pretty low. Many people only drink because other people around them are drinking. That is not really a good reason to take a serious drug.
[+] ramijames|4 years ago|reply
The last two years have been some of the worst of my life.
[+] steveBK123|4 years ago|reply
Similarly when the divorce stats for this period come out in a year or two it will be stunning I have more friends/neighbors/professional acquaintances who got divorced in the last 2 years than in the previous 10.

The last 2 years have been very good for some, and very bad for others. Few had a normal one.

[+] colinmhayes|4 years ago|reply
> The last 2 years have been very good for some, and very bad for others.

This seems like a great way to put it. Personally I've loved my time during the pandemic. Chilling at home with my SO and some marijuana after work is my happy place. Seems like the pandemic forced a lot of people to spend more time with their family which caused them to realize they had settled down with the wrong people.

[+] matwood|4 years ago|reply
Yeah, some people have called it the great quickening. Basically, all the couples would have ended up divorced at some point, and it only accelerated the process.
[+] tzs|4 years ago|reply
Maybe next time we get a pandemic that needs people to stay at home a lot we should issue everyone vouchers good for a free decent beginner's musical instrument and enough free lessons with an instructor over video chat to teach them enough of the basics to get them to where they can continue learning from books and YouTube without an instructor.

That might give people something to both distract them from the pandemic and take up time that might otherwise go to less healthy pursuits. When you are practicing 40 hours a day (69 hours a day if your instrument is bass) there isn't much time to drink.

On the other hand, I suppose it might also lead to an increase in murders and divorces due to how annoying it can be to be in a household with a beginning musician if there is no place they can practice out of earshot of the rest of the household, so it might not be a net win.

[+] servytor|4 years ago|reply
I discovered Kudzu[0] and alcoholism a while ago and hope it might help somebody here or their friend or loved one. Kudzu apparently is an amazing drug for helping people quit drinking. I hope if anybody here has trouble, or knows someone with trouble, they try introducing it to them if it makes sense to them. Here is a BBC article[1], but they only did 500mg instead of 2g. Apparently it works by helping you feel drunk faster, speeding up the time delay effect and thus making you not want to drink as much.

[0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4510012/

[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35381041

[+] after_care|4 years ago|reply
From the nih link

> Drinking was recorded using a custom built end table that contained a digital scale beneath a ceramic tile insert in the tabletop (Ohaus model #B10P with I5S controller). Participants were instructed to always keep the beer glass on the table except when taking a sip. The scale was connected to a computer in an adjacent room that ran a customized program that sampled the scale at 5 Hz and detected any weight changes that exceeded 1 gm. This rapid sampling of the weight permitted a real time assessment of drinking topography that included gross measures of volume and number of beers consumed but also provided details on a more micro level and included the number and size of sips taken, latency to opening a beer, and consumption time of each beer. Additional details and photos of the device can be found in Lukas et al. (2005). Breath alcohol levels were assessed using an Alco-Sensor FST breathalyzer (Intoximeter, Inc., St. Louis, MO) both before and after the drinking session; values were not collected during the active alcohol acquisition period to avoid interacting with the participant and allowing natural drinking patterns to emerge.

I would buy this product for my desk to measure water and coffee intact. Bonus points if it could detect the type of drink automatically based on some measured physical property. It might work well as a cup/bottle instead of a coaster.

[+] AlwaysRock|4 years ago|reply
I drank so much during the first few months of the pandemic that I had to give up drinking altogether. The hangovers and mood swings from drinking regularly were too much and just not worth it for me. I love booze but I didnt drink until I was in my mid 20's so it was easyish for me to stop. I imagine a lot of people were on the edge of very dangerous drinking habits and this pushed them over the edge.
[+] patwolf|4 years ago|reply
The stat from the article that blows my mind is that over 100,000 Americans died of drug overdoses in a 12-month period. The CDC categorizes it with "accidents", so it's easy to overlook when looking at leading causes of death in the US.
[+] psychlops|4 years ago|reply
I notice that "the pandemic" is quickly found as the root cause and no analysis at all is done to identify if the response to the pandemic is to be implicated as well.

I'd wager that waking up one day and discovering that one's job is not essential might be stressful. Being forbidden from going to the beaches and parks might have contributed. The stress of learned helplessness from countless bureaucratic decisions later proven baseless could be analyzed as well.

[+] swatcoder|4 years ago|reply
That’s an aritificially hostile take, isn’t it?

Most people read “the pandemic” as the global event that started around the beginning of 2020 and certainly that’s how this article and it’s title are using it.

Even if you don’t read the article, it feels like a leap to assume that they’re suggesting that the virus itself somehow made people drink more irresponsibly or made people collectively more vulnerable to alcohol. Has anyone suggested that? Would anyone?

Of course it’s referring to the totality of the experience: the virus, the anxiety, the necessary closures, the precautionary mandates and other parts of “the response”, etc etc

[+] emerged|4 years ago|reply
Well you clearly didn’t read the article because the entire thing is talking about all of the sorts of causes you listed.
[+] kevinventullo|4 years ago|reply
Well of course it’s the response. Surely no one thinks that the virus itself causes alcoholism?

I think “the pandemic” here means both the spread of the virus and society’s response to it.

[+] oh_sigh|4 years ago|reply
I'm not trying to blame all our problems on social media, but I think a significant confounding factor that should be considered in any analysis blaming bad unrelated outcomes on the pandemic, is that TikTok exploded in popularity right around the same time as the start of the pandemic(in the US, at least).
[+] jquery|4 years ago|reply
As long as we're pushing preferred narratives (in your case: public health measures = bad), maybe it's because hospitals and treatment rooms were full of unvaccinated individuals and people who declined to social-distance or wear masks, preventing alcoholics in distress from getting the acute treatments they need. Certainly a lot of cancer patients died that way[1][2][3][4][5].

I know a lot of people who took advantage of the pandemic to sort out their lives, including getting sober. Public health authorities from day 1 were taking into account the affects of lockdowns on mental health, thankfully following the evolving science instead of internet conspiracy theories.

[1] https://khn.org/news/article/covid-overwhelmed-hospitals-pos...

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/08/21/how-unvac...

[3] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-12-20/covid-19...

[4] https://www.breastcancer.org/managing-life/staying-well-duri...

[5] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-01-20/hospital...

[+] narenkeshav|4 years ago|reply
They should've opted for weed.
[+] imranq|4 years ago|reply
Cultural acceptance of alcohol use is a strong confounding factor. It should be be in the same category as marijuana, smoking, and other harmful substances
[+] vmception|4 years ago|reply
What's the latest research on the causes of these predispositions to addiction? Any gut bacteria link? Any gene that can be suppressed?
[+] KuhlMensch|4 years ago|reply
Over pandemic I lernt:

- I love getting pissed at the pub

- I hate getting pissed at home doing nothing

- I love the taste of non-alcoholic beer

[+] adamrezich|4 years ago|reply
crazy how absolutely nobody saw nth-order effects coming
[+] barbazoo|4 years ago|reply
I'm trying not to armchair quarterback so I'm asking, what would you have done differently? Aren't there obvious priorities here that need to be dealt with and a deep analysis about potential pandemic responses and their n-th order effects would have been even more detrimental?
[+] spookthesunset|4 years ago|reply
I was yelled at by some people I know quite well when I pointed this stuff out. Only covid mattered to these people. Even when we knew it wasn't nearly as bad as the original models predicted society doubled down on the nonsense.