Yes, it IS helpful for helpless people to admit they are helpless. If you show up and you've literally drank yourself under a bridge and can't figure out how to stop, then you are helpless. Fuck.

I'm sure that the exact same people could have done it both ways. If they'd only tried harder!!

The success rate of AA reminds me a lot of the success rate of diet and exercise. I bet if you polled people that tried diet and exercise to lose their fat asses, you'd find that in 5 years, most were fatter than they were when they started.

Does this mean that diet and exercise doesn't work for weight loss?

DIET AND EXERCISE IS A FAILURE!!!

It means that telling people to eat right and exercise is a poor method of getting people to actually lose weight.

Nah, they're all drinking in the parking lot after.

I'm not even sure how to respond to that. It's just what works. I guess we can complicate it from there. Keep fixing it till it's broken?

Until it's illegal to be drunk and/or fat, you've really got some limits on how much you can do.

Interestingly, this development coincides with a massive influx of obamacare covered alcoholics.

You don't think there's a potential for market exploitation as a motive for this revelation?



AA can't compare to what a licensed therapist in a government funded exchange can accomplish!

That's all fine, it's just funny that people here who know nothing about the program have such strong opinions... But it is GD so thats the way it goes, AA doesn't effect me so I don't care if it helps or not.

I'm saying that if the stated objective is to find the most effective method of actually getting a substantial portion of the overweight population to return to a normal weight...telling them to eat less and move more is a (provably) poor way to achieve that objective. It doesn't work. We've been trying it for decades, and it's not working. Time for a new tactic, to the extent that we're concerned with measurable results and not just bloviating.

BTW, making it illegal to be drunk or fat wouldn't work either.

The difference is that we have made tangible scientific progress in weight loss that can be backed by proof. In alcoholism, every so often we get some bullshit douche like this guy that gets his name in the papers calling out AA and never really back it up with shit.

Kind of like the bitch a few weeks ago that said drug addiction is because people are lonely. She was on every podcast/tv/radio show in the US.

No proof. Books were sold though. Weird.

Being the second A is what it is, how is it realistic to compile success rates worth a shit anyway?

I'm speaking more generally. I have no opinion on the dude who wrote a book, and is doing the talk show/podcast/blog circuit.

What I am saying, is that if the objective is to reduce the incidence of alcoholism in a larger population, AA doesn't seem to be a particularly effective way to achieve that goal. It probably could be, were the organization and it's members amenable to revising methods as science progressed. Unfortunately, they appear (at least to an outsider like me), to behave like a religion - "We have our sacred text, it was perfect when it was originally written, and we're not changing it".

I have never seen such a profoundly wrong and groundless statement.

The fact that I want to assign personal responsibility and self discipline to an individual makes me sound like a "kid".  

Personal real world experience, logic, facts, reality, responsibility and discipline are "childish"..............  







Bottom line is "addiction" = Narcissism.  

Narcissism is the most destructive of all human behaviors.  IF you can't destroy your own personal narcissism, it will destroy you.  It's as certain as death and taxes.

There is no cure to "addiction" till the "addict" can come to terms with this fact.  Everything else is just kicking the can down the road, bailing out till the next collapse.

When you are looking for a helping hand, look at the end of your arm.

Help from others only works when you are willing to help yourself.

Helping a person who refuses to comes to terms with this very simple fact is one the most heartbreaking and futile human endeavors.  

"My poor choices in life were my fault alone.  I am willing to do whatever it takes to not be that person ever again."  Now you're ready to help yourself and receive help from other people.

People fail at "curing addiction" because the above pre-requisites are not met FIRST.

I'm not certain that I understand the source of vitriol for AA.  

AA bad, GD HATE

Rawwww, me break things.

Cause he doesn't have a better idea, but like everyone else, he's got a book to sell. Right there in the second paragraph.

But alas, I haven't seen the hoards of cured screaming from the rooftops. Funny that.

How familiar are you, actually, with what that entails?  Because from their organizational history, their founding philosophy was:


...more and more, Bill discovered that new adherents could get sober by believing in each other and in the strength of this group. Men [no women were members yet] who had proven over and over again, by extremely painful experience, that they could not get sober on their own had somehow become more powerful when two or three of them worked on their common problem. This, then—whatever it was that occurred among them—was what they could accept as a power greater than themselves.

The Wikipedia entry for them is illuminating, including both good and bad.  I think lots of posters here are ascribing things that aren't really applicable.

A.A. is there to help you stay sober not to make you quit. It serves a great purpose for 1000's of people on a daily basis. Doesn't take a dime from the gov. or large donations from outside sources and funds itself through minimal donations from people that attend; if they want to. There isn't a better group around.

In green: How effective has this been at getting alcoholics to...not be alcoholics?

I'm not even saying he's wrong. I'm saying that his solution to the larger problem of societal alcoholism (thus far, objectively) kinda sorta sucks. To be impressed, I need a better line than "it works 100% for the people who circularly believe and behave 100% like the desired outcome".

You know what else works? Just not drinking. It works 100% of the time that it's tried and followed through - every time, without fail.

Am I the only only one who sees the circular nature of that? "If you decide to not drink, and never drink, you'll have never drank again!". Well no fucking shit. Want a cookie? Even if "Stop drinking you asshole" works 5% of the time, it's not reasonable to suggest that my alternative program is effective. Right?

You know, this shit seems self-evident to me.

O

I would guess that people who have "succeeded" in AA would probably say that simply telling themselves "Stop drinking you asshole!" didn't work for them, nor did having other people tell them the same thing.  That is the nature of addiction and presumably largely the point of AA.  Further, it would be news to me if AA was intended to address the societal problem of alcoholism.  As far as I can tell, it intends to address the individual's problem of alcoholism.

 


The tip off is your inability to make a rhetorical argument without quoting somebody else.  And having some other admirable smart guy as your avatar plus your sig line quote from the same member of the pantheon of geniuses of yore.


Because you're so enamored of the cardboard cut out that these people play in your view of the world.


When you grow up, you will be able to express your own ideas and have the confidence to stand by them without quoting some admirable smarty pants.



Assuming of course, they're your ideas and you haven't just signed on to a world view of someone you think is worthy of rote emulation.



Hurray for you.  At present we have established that you know how to read.



Haven't really established your ability to think your own thoughts yet.



Keep working on it.

I lost my wallet once, looked for it high and low. After a while I got really worried and freaked out about it, sheer panic set in, my whole world was coming to an end. Finally I found it, in the last place I looked of course, the clothes dryer. Now I love that dryer and anytime someone tells me something is lost, I tell them it must be in the dryer and I'm right 5% of the time.

That's how aa works.

I spoke of personal responsibility and self discipline.  Your counter was emotion and insults.    (Usually means you hit on truth).

Yet, you accuse me of not being able to "think" for myself.  

However, I must confess I didn't think of these ground breaking behavior concepts myself.  I just elected to abide by them like a responsible adult.  So you got me there.

Every once in a while you're going to hear truths you don't like.  It's part of life.  Denial isn't a way to deal with inconvenient truths.

That is the great thing about christianity, it gives one a second chance.  It might all be dumbo's feather or whatever, but it gives someone the notino that they could/ought to be better & the license sort of let go of the past and start again w/ some measure of optimism & confidence.  That and the notion of universality of morals & rights & stuff like that.  Of course, there arenbe problems w/ the scapegoating parts & yahway & many of the central characters being dicks & so forth, particularly in the OT.  Anyway, whether you belive that you have the power to turn over a new leaf if you really want to and you carry it out in sensible way, or you belive that god has the power to make you a new person or whatever, I can see how the AA notion of necessarily labeling yourself as an alchoholic and then continuing to do so till the day you die can be counter productive.

lol, admittedly, at that point sure.  But do they have to hold as a pillar of the faith, that they will ever be so for the rest of their life, always on the razor's edge where the only way to survie is total life long abstinence & there are no small mis-steps (so if you slip up and have a drink, you may as well go on a 3 day binder to make it worth your while.)?  Reminds me of trying to cram in all the sins you can before you go to confession on sat afternoon lol.

I use the word monopoly...loosely.  Yes, AA does not have a literal monopoly on treatment.  AA does, or did for many many years, have such an overwhelming pre-eminence in addiction treatment that many people, including judges, sort of assumed all treatments were 12 step based.  In fact, the overwhelming majority of rehap centers in america were 12 step based, probably still are.  I should have said "virtual monopoly."  

Nevertheless, there was that Iowa Senator's congressional grant that funded that group that pretty much go co-opted by AA and made it its business to maintain AA's pre-eminence in the public consciousness, at lest according to the article.