SARAH’S HISTORY ABOUT ADDICTS AND ALCOHOLISM

Married to a top businessman, Paul, Sarah lives in an eighteenth-century rectory in a small village in Hampshire. She is fifty-nine and has two adult children. A mongrel dog, Duke, completes the household.

Her drug-taking, all of it perfectly legal, started when she was twenty-five and working as a physiotherapist in a hospital. The doctor with whom she was working prescribed Sodium Amytal. She took these, or some other barbiturate sleeping pills, continuously for the next twenty-seven years.

'I was totally dependent on them. If I was going on holiday, the sleeping pills would be top of the list of things I had to take with me,' she recalls.

Yet she never abused her pills by taking more than were prescribed - she didn't need to, as doctors were always generous with their prescriptions.

She got married and had two children, both boys. Her marriage was - and still is - a remarkably happy one, except for the years in which drug-using and drink destroyed that happiness.

'I began to use drink to change my feelings around 1968,' recalls Sarah. 'I remember when my older boy was first going to boarding school. He was very homesick, and week after week I'd ring up and be told he was still crying himself to sleep. One night I thought: "I can't bear this, but I've got to phone the school. I know - I'll have a good stiff gin and tonic and then it won't be too bad." '

Over the next two years her drinking became more of a problem. By 1970 her local family doctor confronted her and told her she might be an alcoholic. 'I knew him socially and he saw me about the village. He confronted me on the basis of his observation of me.'

Sarah promptly changed doctors and told all her friends what a lousy GP he had been. Her drinking escalated - a drink at lunchtime, then the odd drink before lunchtime, then a drink during the morning to get going. She drank at home secretly and started hiding bottles.

'I didn't have to steal in the ordinary sense, but I stole from my husband. I would go to the local town's department store, buy spirits and then ask them to put it down as other goods on our account. Then I'd tell him I'd been buying presents for people.'

She also started getting medical help - not for her drinking, but for her 'depression'. T told my new GP that my problem was depression because my husband was often away on business and my children were away at school.'

Sarah was referred to a psychiatrist who was supposed to know about alcoholism, but she did not tell him about her drinking. He prescribed pills for her depression. 'At various different times I was given barbiturates like Soneryl, Seconal and Tuinal. Then as tranquillisers I had Mogadon and Dalmane, and two kinds of antidepressants. He just kept trying one thing after another for my depression.'

To check up on her drinking, the psychiatrist had Sarah to stay in his house for a week. She had to arrive at 9 a.m. and stay till 6 p.m. During that week she waited till she got home at night to drink. After seven days of not drinking while she was at his house, the psychiatrist announced: 'Now we've proved you are not an alcoholic!'

Sarah began a round of fee-paying nursing homes. She had electric-shock treatment and hypnotism. The psychiatrist even gave her Duke, the mongrel dog who is now the family pet. 'He said it would help me if I had a dog to love.'

Then her psychiatrist died, and Sarah was transferred to a new one. i really conned that man. I used to see him in Harley Street, and I would nip into the ladies loo of a nearby department store with a quarter bottle of vodka before my appointment. Then when he asked about my drinking, I would say it was no problem.' She told him she had lapses of memory and he sent her for a brain scan. She even had an EEG test for epilepsy. T didn't know then, but the memory lapses were alcoholic blackouts.'

During this time, the family was beginning to suffer from her drinking. Both boys were at boarding school. 'The older boy began to start not coming home at half-terms and out-weekends. He had excuses like playing in a match, but I knew what it was.' Her husband Paul began to spend more and more time in London, where he had a business flat. 'He felt he couldn't just walk out and leave me.'

Sarah herself felt more and more desperate. Her husband once came home to find her standing on an upstairs window sill threatening to jump. She overdosed twice on pills and booze.

‘I felt I couldn't go on,' she says, describing one of her overdoses. T could see what I was doing to the family, and I loved them. There was nobody in the house and I didn't think anybody was coming back so I took a handful of barbiturates, and then another and another till I lost consciousness.' Unexpectedly, her husband returned early that day and rushed her to hospital.

By this time Sarah's psychiatrist had realised drink was the problem: a nursing home had discovered a vodka bottle hidden in her handbag. He had tried aversion therapy and Antabuse tablets (which make patients sick when they drink), but both treatments failed. He now recommended Alcoholics Anonymous.

But although Sarah went to AA meetings regularly, she couldn't stop drinking or taking pills. 'The members were always so nice to me, even though I was full of pills or half sloshed at meetings. And it was from them I heard about a clinic whose treatment philosophy was compatible with AA.'

She phoned the clinic herself and booked herself in for the following day. Her psychiatrist warned her that if she stopped taking the pills she was addicted to, she would have problems and might try to commit suicide again.

The clinic gradually took her off alcohol and all her pills, including the barbiturates she had been taking for twenty-seven years. T went down there determined to co-operate because I knew it was my last chance. I behaved rather like a schoolgirl at boarding school. I liked the discipline and I felt safe. I told my counsellor everything about myself.'

When she came out of the clinic, Sarah went back to the Alcoholics Anonymous meetings she already knew. She also discovered that her marriage was not lost. T didn't know what it would be like. There had been no physical relationship between me and Paul for a couple of years. Maybe Paul would say: "Now you're OK, you get on with it." The first time we made love again, I phoned my counsellor to tell her the good news.'

It took some months for Paul to trust her again, but somehow their marriage survived and now they are happy with each other once more. Sarah still goes to AA meetings to maintain her sobriety and she helps other alcoholics to become sober themselves.

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