Up to 50 per cent of the children of alcoholics may go on to marry someone with a drink problem, a psychologist said yesterday at the WONCA medical conference in Dublin.
Mr Michael Hardiman, who has carried out extensive research on alcoholism, said children growing up in homes with an alcoholic parent may suffer from post-traumatic stress.
In the US, he said, when doctors were treating Vietnam war veterans they recognised their psychological symptoms - they had seen them before in the children of alcoholics. For these children, "ghosts come back to haunt them" in their 30s and 40s. Often they start drinking or marry someone with similar problems.
He said growing up in such an environment leads to emotional neglect. Care of children was inconsistent, promises were broken and there was abuse. Mr Hardi man, who is based in Galway, said 50 per cent of domestic violence was related to alcohol.
When people living with alcoholics went to their GP, they were not inclined to say they were "married to an alcoholic or the child of one, as they don't feel the effects", said Mr Hardiman.
"Fish don't feel wet," he explained.
The family structure tended to embrace the problem and keep it secret. The co-dependent spouses became emotionally entangled, losing self-esteem and developing high levels of anxiety and depression.
For people who begin drinking in their late teens it became a serious problem when they were in their 30s and 40s and raising a family. One in 10 Irish men, he said, would be treated for an alcoholic disorder in their lifetime.
Mr Hardiman said children in those families developed different roles: the "family hero" - the child who always coped, a high achiever but a control freak, unable to trust; the "care-taker" - the child who tried to ease suffering, was sensitive and emotional and often became a doctor or a nurse; the "lost child" - often intelligent but very quiet and an under-achiever who learnt not to attract attention; the "family mascot" - the child who constantly used humour to hide the pain; the "rebel" - the child driven by anger who often got into trouble with the law, the black sheep of the family.