Aaron Pankratz, manager of the agency’s Senior Connection Program, said elder adults belong to one of the groups most vulnerable to alcoholism. Unfortunately, that’s also one of the most-often ignored groups.
According to information from the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), data suggest that the number of substance-dependent and -abusing adults aged 50 or older will climb from approximately 1.7 million in the early 2000s to 4.4 million by 2020.
In a periodically published report, SAMHSA said alcohol was the most frequently reported primary substance abused by people aged 50 and older admitted to detox facilities. The highest proportions of people reporting alcohol as the primary substance were aged 65 and older.
As with any disease, the symptoms of alcoholism can manifest themselves in many different ways.
A “functioning alcoholic” is someone who is addicted to alcohol but can go about his or her life in a seemingly normal fashion. And when it comes to seniors who are functioning alcoholics, Pankratz said, “the alcoholism has been masked by skills and behaviors that start to deteriorate when someone starts to age: vision, balance, and memory.”
Some seniors, on the other hand, drank socially when they were younger, but increased the habit as a way to cope with the stresses of getting older, such as the death of a spouse, decreased mobility, or financial troubles.
Regardless of how the addiction formed, alcoholism among the elderly isn’t a new phenomenon. But more often than not, Pankratz said, alcoholism is either “dismissed or ignored” by family members or given a low priority compared to other problems associated with aging.
“A lot of caregivers—children mostly—start talking to me about their parents’ aging problems, and then it starts to come out that alcoholism or medication abuse is in the picture,” Pankratz said.
And the alcoholism, he added, is met with excuses such as: “My dad always has three glasses of wine after dinner.” Or, “My dad always has a night cap.”
To that, Pankratz replies: “If your 22-year-old cousin was drinking or using, you’d sit him down and say, ‘You really need to knock this off.’ It shouldn’t be any different with seniors.”
When it comes to addressing alcoholism, however, Bob Lindsey, president and CEO of the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence, said people tend to focus on treating the symptoms as opposed to the disease itself.
“We’re very good at doing all kinds of things to respond to the problems caused by alcohol: problems caused in the workplace, problems that affect driving, and that affect relationships,” Lindsey said. “But when dealing with addictions, the only thing that can help is treating them directly.”
These remedies, Lindsey said, are applied especially frequently to the senior population in the form of well-meaning physicians “prescribing a range of medications to address the symptoms rather than doing screenings only to find that alcohol is the root of the problem.”
But this approach has a tendency to backfire.
“It usually makes them healthy enough to start drinking or using again,” Lindsey said.
Supplying seniors with copious amounts of medication, he added, can also make them more likely to develop a drug habit.
“Common sense says that a person is drinking because he or she is depressed,” Lindsey added. “But for people who become alcoholic, it is a physical and emotional dependence.
“The best way to help Mom, Dad, Grandma, or Grandpa is to get to a professional who is experienced with treating alcoholism,” he said.
Seeking treatment for an addiction can be daunting, especially for some seniors who think it’s too late to get help or not worth the trouble.
To combat such misconceptions, Lindsey recalls an encounter he had with a 72-year-old woman.
“She told me, ‘Any old biddies like me who say it’s not worth it to get sober, tell them they’re full of it,’” Lindsey said.
“She’d been sober for five years and she said it was the best five years of her life,” he added.
Contact Staff Writer Amy Asman at aasman@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Apr 30 – May 7, 2009.