PSYC 221 Abnormal Psychology (Whyte): Alcoholism and Addiction

True account. Drinking is Caroline Kapp's harrowing chronicle of her twenty-year love affair with alcohol. This startlingly honest memoir lays bare the secrecy, family myths, and destructive relationships that go hand in hand with drinking. Fifteen million Americans a year are plagued with alcoholism. Five million of them are women. Many of them, like Caroline Knapp, started in their early teens and began to use alcohol as "liquid armor," a way to protect themselves against the difficult realities of life.

Alcohol is the drug of choice among American women. An astonishing 4 million women meet the diagnostic criteria for abuse or dependence.Women metabolize alcohol differently from men, more quickly developing such physical complications as liver disease, high blood pressure, and hepatitis. A female alcoholic is likely to suffer from depression, anxiety, and eating disorders, which may not go away even if she stops drinking. Commonly, her alcohol abuse is comb combined with the abuse of other drugs. She is at high risk for suicide.

True account. A raw and twisty page-turning memoir that reads like fiction, High Achiever spans Tiffany’s life as an active opioid addict, her 120 days in a Florida jail where every officer despised what she’d done to their brother in blue, and her eventual recovery. With heart-racing urgency and unflinching honesty, Jenkins takes you inside the grips of addiction and the desperate decisions it breeds.

True account. This is what she’d been searching for –relief. Instant relief. Getting drunk becomes her rite of passage as she careens through junior and senior high school caving in to peer pressure for her need to feel accepted. Through secretarial school and early jobs, her twenties are a blur. Quicker than she can take a tequila shot in a Mexican café, change her lovers weekly, and party with the dregs of society, as well as the socialites and future executives – Nancy finds a lifestyle that seems to work for her.

True account. By the time he entered a drug and alcohol treatment facility, James Frey had taken his addictions to near-deadly extremes. He had so thoroughly ravaged his body that the facilityís doctors were shocked he was still alive. The ensuing torments of detoxification and withdrawal, and the never-ending urge to use chemicals, are captured with a vitality and directness.

From earliest experimentation to habitual excess to full-blown abuse, twenty-four-year-old Koren Zailckas leads us through her experience of a terrifying trend among young girls, exploring how binge drinking becomes routine, how it becomes “the usual.” With the stylistic freshness of a poet and the dramatic gifts of a novelist, Zailckas describes her first sip at fourteen, alcohol poisoning at sixteen, a blacked-out sexual experience at nineteen, total disorientation after waking up in an unfamiliar New York City apartment at twenty-two, when she realized she had to stop, and all the depression, rage, troubled friendships, and sputtering romantic connections in between. Zailckas’s unflinching candor and exquisite analytical eye gets to the meaning beneath the seeming banality of girls’ getting drunk. She persuades us that her story is the story of thousands of girls like her who are not alcoholics—yet—but who use booze as a short cut to courage, a stand-in for good judgment, and a bludgeon for shyness, each of them failing to see how their emotional distress, unarticulated hostility, and depression are entangled with their socially condoned binging. Like the contemporary masterpieces The Liars’ Club, Autobiography of a Face, and Jarhead, Smashedis destined to become a classic. A crucial book for any woman who has succumbed to oblivion through booze, or for anyone ready to face the more subtle repercussions of their own chronic over-drinking or of someone they love, Smashedis an eye-opening, wise, and utterly gripping achievement.

True account. When Sacha Z. Scoblic was drinking, she was a rock star; the days were rough and the nights filled with laughter and blackouts. Then she gave it up. She had to. Here are her adventures in an utterly and maddeningly sober world. . .and how she discovered that nothing is as odd and fantastic as life without a drink in hand. . .

True account of Betty Miller, Deaf artist and her struggles with alcohol.

True account.
Malia Johnson is adopted and, at six months of age, diagnosed as deaf. Her horrified mother desperately tries to raise her as hearing, which confuses young Malia. Her silent world is wrought with teasing from her peers and harsh discipline from her mother as she forces her to learn lip reading and speech six hours a day, seven days a week. Feeling isolated and unable to express herself, Malia plunges into a life of sex, drugs, alcohol, and anorexia. She represses her sexuality at risk of further alienation - and looks for love in the wrong places.

The gifted author writes a moving memoir about his adopted son, a victim of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, and of the condition itself.