Teresa was a forty-five-year-old marketing manager who knew that she had some problems with her drinking. As an illustration, within the past four months she has experienced the need to have a drink or two before going to work, three months ago she failed a random blood alcohol test where she works, four months ago she got pulled over by the state highway patrol for a DUI, and last but not least, for approximately four months she has started to forget what she says and does when she drinks.
Like huge numbers of other people, Teresa’s experiences with alcohol began at a “snail’s pace” and remained at this level for quite a long period of time because every now and again she engaged in intermittent social drinking. In reality, for about a year, every time she went out with her pals to drink, she made sure to drink in moderation. Something about her drinking situation, however, seemed to radically change when her husband divorced her.
So She Can Rise Above the Breakup of Her Husband In a Less Wearisome Manner, Teresa Came to a Decision That She Will Begin Associating More Repeatedly With Some of Her Pals Who Love to Have Fun and Drink
Teresa got extremely down in the dumps about the breakup with her husband, and as a way to stop her preoccupation with her disheartening feelings she made up her mind to start associating more regularly with some of her buddies who love to have fun and drink.
Quite sincerely, Teresa truly believed that having fun almost every day by getting an alcohol “buzz” with her pals would help her recover from the breakup of her husband with less sorrow.
Teresa’s Drinking Escalates Greatly the More Habitually She Goes to Sporting Events, Family Get-Togethers, Dinner Dates, Happy Hours, and Private Parties With Her Pals
It didn’t take very long, nonetheless, before her drinking increased to a significant extent the more routinely she went to and drank at private parties, happy hours, family get-togethers, dinner dates, and sporting events with her pals. Not only this, but the fact that her drinking buddies were all considerably younger than she was and therefore able to party and drink more recklessly was one of the reasons that she didn’t allocate more of her attention to her increased drinking. To put it briefly, she was drinking and having a lot of fun just like everyone else in her group of pals without giving too much thought to the negative results of her irresponsible and hazardous drinking.
Yet in the recesses of her mind she knew that she most probably required alcohol rehab but sidestepped the thought as much as humanly possible.
Teresa Gets a Physical, Owns Up to the Facts About Her Hazardous and Irresponsible Drinking to Her Doctor, and Owns Up to the Truth About Her Melancholy
One late afternoon during her six-month physical, her doctor asked her if she drank alcohol. Not wanting to tell “stories” to her physician, Teresa owned up to the fact that she commonly drinks more than she should. As a matter of fact, she said that she regularly drinks in an excessive and irresponsible manner. Then Teresa informed her healthcare practitioner about her melancholy. More explicitly, she stated that wrecked relationships more often than not caused a discouraging progression of events characterized by increased drinking which further resulted in more depressing feelings that, in turn, led to more drinking. And this is explicitly what took place when she and her husband got divorced nine months ago.
When her healthcare practitioner heard this, he told Teresa that according to various facts and statistics on alcoholism he has been researching, alcoholism and depression often arise in the same individual. He then told her that some of the alcohol statistics, facts, and research investigations he has been reading about also point out that people who drink excessively and who also experience depression need to get treatment for both medical circumstances.
Teresa’s Physician Makes an Appointment for a Psychological Evaluation and For an Alcoholism and Alcohol Abuse Assessment
Teresa’s healthcare practitioner then stated the following: “I am not trying to make an overly quick diagnosis, but with your medical situation we may be dealing with two separate matters. As a result, I think we probably should schedule an appointment for you to get an alcohol abuse and alcohol addiction assessment from my partner, Dr. Fox, who is an alcohol dependency and alcohol abuse specialist. Whether your drinking problem is more associated with alcoholism or alcohol abuse is not clear, but I think that further exploration is warranted. Then I think we should make an appointment for you to get a psychological assessment from another one of my partners, Dr. Nardi, who is a clinical psychologist. I want to get some more information about your sadness and see how much your depression and drinking are intertwined.” Teresa expressed her approval of her doctor’s treatment approach and thanked him for his assistance. Now all she had to do was to try to reduce her drinking and wait for her appointments.
