While drinking every now and then is not a problem, excessive alcohol consumption can lead to extreme alcohol abuse and ultimately alcoholism. The society we live in is strongly prejudiced by alcohol and affects people of all ages and backgrounds. Alcohol has been manifested in millionaires to the homeless. History has shown that alcohol abuse is a severe problem and that it is a disease that has caused numerous people to be overcome with trouble, problems, and debts. According to the American Society of Addiction Medicine, Alcoholism is, “a primary, chronic disease with genetic, psychosocial, and environmental factors influencing its development and manifestations.” People who are fixated on alcohol pose a threat to others but most importantly themselves. The causes of alcoholism have internal and external factors that lead to life-threatening effects. In particular, I will focus on how alcoholism affects mortality rates, memory functions, and the effects it has on social and family relationships to prevent this disorder. Also, I will be using the book The Glass Castle to show how the main character Rex Walls becomes a heinous individual towards his family because of his addiction and dependency on alcohol.
Those who are fixated on alcohol impose many risks upon themselves and a significant concern is the mortality rate. Most people in society know how detrimental alcohol is to the body, especially how it can start from disease and ultimately lead to death. According to Parvarin, he states that “Cancers (except breast cancer), road accidents, suicide were the major causes of death in alcoholic men… infections, coronary heart disease, respiratory diseases, digestive diseases (including liver cirrhosis) were major causes of death in women” (187). The death of male alcoholics mainly stemmed from external factors. The death of female alcoholics stemmed from internal factors such as organ diseases. We can see that alcoholism itself does not kill a person, but it starts to pile up which leads to harmful effects that become life-threatening. Although men and women have different rates of mortality, this category can be dived deeper by age: young and old. Parvarin touches upon individuals that are 18-44 years old, external factors were a dominant effect compared to internal factors mentioned above (187). From seeing the effects alcoholism imposes upon different ages and genders, the comparison of the general population to alcoholics will give the audience a better grasp of the consequences of being an alcoholic. In Bologna, there was a study done in this journal from January 1997 to December 2013, where they tracked patients with alcohol abuse and alcohol dependence to see how long this would last. Eventually, those results indicated that patients suffering from these horrendous addictions had a two to five times higher risk of death compared to the general population. Since we can see how quickly alcohol is dispersed among the youth, we can expect an increase in the alcoholic population. It is extremely frightening to see how high the risk of mortality is for alcoholics since dependency is like a coping mechanism for the negative factors in life. There was a point made in this journal that said, “It is well known that being unemployed may play a crucial role as a risk factor for persistent heavy drinking and for alcohol relapses and for increased risk in developing some specific cancers” (190). In The Glass Castle, Rex Walls should be diagnosed to being an alcohol addict because he constantly uses alcohol as a coping mechanism. Drinking alcohol made him vulnerable to contracting tuberculosis, which made him weaker and weaker as the years went by. The mortality rate in the alcoholic community must be heavily considered with all the negative effects alcohol imposes upon them.
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Memory is another tool that is heavily damaged when becoming an alcohol addict. After a fragmentary blackout, one may recall portions of the episode after cues for events are provided. Three primary phases form our memories: “encoding, or initial registration and interpretation of stimuli; storage, or consolidation and maintenance of encoded stimuli; and retrieval, or search and recovery of stored stimuli” (Hartzler 629). “Alcohol impairs encoding of complex material and limits the number of registered stimuli” (Hartzler 629. This informs us on how alcohol can mess with the way our brain works. This eventually makes it difficult to retrieve stored material in the brain. The executive cognition function is in the hands of the retrieval process, which has the job of organizing and planning. Alcohol abuse slows down the function of the brain and people demonstrate low executive cognition function. The potential effects on the Executive cognition function, “raises the possibility that similar premorbid differences in memory retrieval may exist” (Hartzler 629). People who possess front lobe pathology show disabilities in the executive cognition function. Alcohol has harmful effects on the original memory, which leads to short-term memory loss. Rex Walls demonstrates aggressive behavior toward the family, but he ends up forgetting the actions he caused because alcohol fades away those memories. “They said that drunks didn’t remember their rampages, so if you cleaned up after them, they’d think nothing happened” (112). If fragmentary blackouts are from deficient retrieval processes: spatial, temporal, and social contexts may be implicated. Hartzler categorizes alcohol expectancies into positive and negative expectancies. Positive expectancies from alcoholics must be a huge what the heck moment but let me explain. The initial feeling for person who is drinking shows a euphoric feeling which is followed by sedative effects. An alcoholic is more focused on the short-term effects rather than recalling their memory back. This is why view drinking as a positive thing. The negative expectancies occur mainly from a person’s past experience. These expectancies display that “greater perceived likelihood problems might sufficiently facilitate greater expectancies of their future recurrence” (Hartzler 634). This basically means that those who look at alcohol consumption in a negative way are more likely to be more cautious about their next drink. A similar incident unfolds in The Glass Castle when Brian drinks some alcohol for the first time and said it was the worst thing he ever tasted (113). Brian did not enjoy the taste of alcohol offered and will be more vigilant the next time he has a drink. Alcohol creates damage to the memory of an individual and not being able to have memory recollection could hurt the relationships you have with others.
Social relationships are vital to people’s daily lives and people need each other for support. However, alcoholism is the breaker when it comes to social relationships. For example, when there is a family member that is an alcoholic, the whole family becomes chaotic and turns into a big mess. As mentioned before, health problems and memory loss are factors that do not allow a family to become a true family. This can also be described as children of alcoholics (COA). High marital dissatisfaction is directly correlated with family climate. Because they are associated, constant tension within a family is more frequent. Alcoholism is the biggest factor when it comes to marital satisfaction and its causes. Marital dissatisfaction results in abandonment which can be detrimental to the child growing up. From The Glass Castle, we are able to see why the family is devastated by the father's actions. The author states that “He found Mom in the bathroom, crouched in the tub...they fought their way into the dining room, and he knocked her to the floor” (122). The children in the story were shown how distorted of a father Rex Walls has become. Rex Walls is in denial about the dependency on alcohol because of how deformed the family has become. Ultimately, there was no real family and the children moved out. Family dysfunction and alcohol effects are measured simultaneously by researchers. Because of this, it is difficult to tell the order in which relationships got affected. In family cases, children begin to have their own roles and duties in order to handle dysfunction within the family. Alcohol dependence plays a huge negative role in the severity of family problems, which will affect how the next generation handles the people around them.
It is clear that alcoholism is an indicator of the destruction of family relations. Just like how fire causes physical destruction around the family, alcohol is an internal disruptor for the Walls. The health of the Rex Walls deteriorates over time causing him to eventually be hospitalized at the end of his life. The family does not handle his outrages and falls back allowing him to continue with this destructive behavior. Since his memory is always altered by the amount of alcohol he drinks, attacking his wife created a hostile environment leading to a falling out with every member of the family. By connecting the actions of Rex Walls throughout the book, we can conclude that these effects of alcoholism trickled down to the characters in the book in a negative way.
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