Christmas is traditionally a time for families. Christmas is also traditionally a drinking festival, when even those who abstain feel under pressure to have "at least one". The office party, with its institutionalised bingeing and misbehaviour, heralds a season of socially acceptable over-indulgence when even morning drinking is allowed. Anyone who doesn't make merry at the risk of coming a cropper may be made to feel like Scrooge. Even Santa has a bulbous, alcoholic nose. Today, December 28th, chances are that a fair proportion of us who drink regularly are nursing a hangover. Drinking isn't necessarily a bad thing, of course; alcohol is a social lubricant and an ice-breaker. The problem is that it is also a depressant, so that while it may initially make you feel more relaxed, within an hour you will also feel a let-down. So there's the inevitable temptation to have another drink and then another and another to boost your spirits. One in three Irish drinkers regularly binge-drink on a weekly basis.
The Irish laissez-faire attitude to drinking has long been the stuff of legend and literature, although hard figures have been difficult to come by. But a recent study of Irish drinking habits by researchers in the Mid-Western Health Board has changed all that (see panel). It found that only 4.4 per cent of Irish people can correctly estimate the safe drinking limit for either men or women, while a mere 5.1 per cent know the limits for both men and women. Nine out of 10 people haven't a clue what the safe limits are. Seven out of 10 Irish people are regular drinkers and 35.5 per cent of these exceed safe levels. In the season of good cheer, many drinkers feel they have tacit permission to go on the skite because "everybody does it" and "what's the problem"? In the Christmas post-mortem period which hits every year in the trough between Christmas and the New Year, anyone who is feeling that maybe there is a problem may have trouble getting their voice heard.
Alcoholism is insidious in families, arising from generation to generation because its troublesome and tenacious nest in the family tree is protected by stigma, denial and silence on the one hand, and, on the other, by a genetic vulnerability which scientists in Ireland and the US are only beginning to explore. There is no doubt that alcoholism runs in families; studies of twins separated at birth and of adopted children adopted of alcoholic birth parents have clearly shown that there are biological factors which put some people at risk, no matter what their childhood environment.
The annual co-celebration of alcohol and Christmas means that families are most likely to have to deal with florid and obnoxious alcoholism on the one day of the year when advertisers tell them they are supposed to be enjoying the "magic of Christmas". Year after year, generation after generation, the Christmas post-mortem involves dealing with the disappointment that the magic didn't happen. Instead, families find themselves mulling over who did what, who said what and how drunk they were when it happened. Domestic violence rises at Christmas-time because alcoholic parents and partners feel they have permission to drink, then lose their inhibitions and behave destructively.
"Just after Christmas can be the most distressing time for families because there is a lull and time to think," says Maura Russell, director of the Rutland Centre in Dublin, which will be holding a family mobilisation programme on Wednesday, January 6th to help families deal with the emotional fallout of Christmas with an alcoholic. "Now that the busyness of the pre-Christmas rush is over, and the day itself is gone, families are reflecting on what kind of Christmas it has been, and they're thinking about this while fully sober with the haze of alcohol disappearing. "This feeling is heightened by the fact that everybody is asking `how was Christmas?' and everybody is recounting to everybody else what kind of Christmas they had. So there's pressure to report that you have had a `nice Christmas' and for some people it may have been the worst of times. This is particularly so for people who have a family member who is addicted, and using alcohol or drugs or gambling to excess so that there was not enough money for Christmas, or that the person wasn't there or slept the whole way through Christmas Day."
PEOPLE invest so much in having their dreams come true at Christmas-time, that when those dreams are broken due to excessive alcohol, the sober family members may feel disillusioned and angry. Many of us see Christmas as a time for reconciliation, for families being together, for relationships to work out or to make a better effort. And suddenly Christmas is over and nothing has changed, or maybe it has been another bad Christmas like before. "In these days following Christmas, there can be enormous tension within the family, for the sober person who was there and lived through it all, as well as for the person who caused the havoc who is now reflecting back and feeling bad about it," says Ms Russell.
Perhaps the most tragic aspect of the chaos which alcoholism can bring to a family is that the behaviour may not end even with the death of the alcoholic, but may be passed from parent to child to grandchild. The Irish Alcohol Project, run jointly by Dr Dermot Walsh, of the Health Research Board, and Professor Kenneth Kendler, of the Medical College of Virginia in the US, is trying to locate the specific gene which makes certain people more vulnerable to alcoholism than others. Why is it, for example, that an alcoholic parent may have five children, only one of whom becomes an alcoholic like himself? If you have an alcoholic sibling, does that mean you too are at risk? Are some people inevitably alcoholics with the first drink they take? Or are there other factors involved? And could we some day have a blood test which warns vulnerable people never to take that first drink?
In order to answer these questions, Dr Walsh needs to gather sibling pairs with alcohol problems who are willing to submit blood samples in exchange for a fee of £25 per sample. The blood will be send to San Diego in the US for genetic analysis. "Genetic vulnerability to alcoholism is a very, very complicated matter; we will not find a single gene which expresses itself as alcoholism, in the way that a single gene transmits Cystic Fibrosis or Muscular Dystrophy from parent to child, giving the child a 50/50 chance of the disease," says Dr Walsh.
Alcoholism is not purely genetic; behaviour and life experience play huge roles, too. But if you have an alcoholic parent or sibling, should you drink at all? "Be very careful. You are clearly at a much increased risk," advises Professor Anthony Clare, director of St Patrick's Hospital, Dublin, where the influx of patients with alcohol problems increases by 50 per cent shortly after Christmas. "In Ireland, there are very few of us who would not have an alcoholic relative somewhere in our family tree," adds Professor Clare. That's something to think about on New Year's Eve.
The Irish Alcohol Project urgently requires siblings with alcohol problems to volunteer to give blood samples. If you are willing to help, call freephone 1-800200041.
The Rutland Centre will be having a family mobilisation programme on Wednesday, January 6th (phone Gerry Cooney at 01-4946358).
The Marriage and Relationships Counselling Service can be reached at (01) 6799341.