Two points on this study:
(1) Understand that
psychiatry and medicine have arguably no place in defining what is a disease and what is not.
(2) Given what they are said to have done with the data, I would have been surprised if they
hadn't found increased alcohol use among ethnic minorities, etc, etc.
The study itself indicates that both the 2001 and 2013 surveys on which these results compiled the results with...
Quote:Quote:
...black, Asian or Pacific Islander, and Hispanic individuals oversampled.
But of course, according to the survey:
Quote:Quote:
Data were adjusted for oversampling and nonresponse and were weighted to represent the US civilian population based on the 2012 American Community Survey.
Okay; how? Ahhhh, no data there or explanation of how the weighting was done; only the standard get-out clause that somebody else approved the way they did it.
That said, there is one result in here that doesn't surprise me:
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Older adults have had consistently lower rates than others of alcohol use, high-risk drinking, and AUD over the past 40 years. However, between 2001-2002 and 2012-2013, increases in alcohol use (22.4%), high-risk drinking (65.2%), and AUD (106.7%) among older adults were substantial and unprecedented relative to earlier surveys.
"Older adults" by the statistics is anyone over the age of 65. We know they didn't follow up the same people. In 2001-2, being over 65 meant you were the tail end of the Greatest Generation, born in the 1940s. In 2013, the "over 65" contingent of the survey sample would be smack-bang in the middle of the Baby Boomers, born in the 1950s.
Between the 30-64 year olds of the two surveys -- i.e. Gen X through to the youngest Baby Boomers -- the increase in alcoholism is about half that, i.e. 11% or so. It's least in anyone under 18. Same pattern holds for high-risk drinking and AUD: the Baby Boomers lead the charge in drinking oneself to death.
Let me remind you that the Baby Boomers were the generation that had convinced itself it had solved the world's problems with narcissism and consumerism. These guys created "Spending the Kids' Inheritance."
Let's also consider the significance of something else here. Prior to the first of these two surveys (collected between April 2001 and June 2002), older adults had consistently lower rates of alcohol use.
Add to that that alcohol is frequently a coping mechanism, a way of getting to blot out reality, to make you "more sociable", make you better able to connect with other people.
Let us wonder:could this massive increase in alcoholism be down to coping with the impact of one event?
Was there some event between April 2001 and April 2014 that could possibly prompt large swathes of people to decide heavy alcohol consumption was more preferable than facing the world as it is?
Surely not. That couldn't happen, not to Americans.
What event could have occurred on such a scale as to render so many people powerless, so confronted with their mortality and purposelessness of their existence, to make a wholesale plunge into alcoholic oblivion more attractive -- to not one but two generations?
Remissas, discite, vivet.
God save us from people who mean well. -storm