That’s men: Let’s bin the binge and tackle harmful drinking instead

Sometimes John has a couple of drinks in the evening. Sometimes he has nothing alcoholic at all. Once a week, though, he drinks a full bottle of wine.

Asked if he was a binge drinker, John would almost certainly say he was not. Binge drinkers get out of their heads and totter around Temple Bar, or your local equivalent, at three o'clock in the morning.

Yet it appears that John does, officially, binge-drink once a week and he is, therefore, a binge drinker.

But is it, I wonder, helpful to put John into the same category as people who roar their way through pubs and nightclubs for hours on end and finish up God knows where and in God knows what state?

And if you think drinking a full bottle of wine is overdoing it, what about having three pints of beer over an evening? That, I’m afraid, is binging also because that’s the equivalent of six “standard” drinks.

When The Irish Times did an online survey in April (Did you drink too much last week? Yes, most of you did, 22nd April), it noted that having six or more "standard" drinks in one sitting is considered binge drinking by the HSE.

Drink a bottle of wine with 12.5 per cent alcohol content (way lower than almost every bottle on the shelves) and you've had seven "standard" drinks., according to the piece by Ciara Kenny and Pamela Duncan.

Almost half of the men and women had consumed six “standard” drinks or more on at least one day of the week. Yet many probably don’t see themselves as binge drinkers because on most nights of the week they go to bed sober.

Harming their cause

It seems to me that people involved in

health promotion

who use words like “binge” drinking are harming their cause. The word has so many associations of the kind I mentioned above that the whole message is likely to be rejected.

To describe sitting in a pub for an evening and having three pints as “binging” is, it seems to me, ridiculous. If it is harmful, then call it harmful.

Health promotion in relation to alcohol is a really, really, tough task. On the day before the survey results were published, Ciara Kenny reported a statement by Cork University Hospital hepatologist Dr Orla Crosbie that cirrhosis of the liver is affecting more and more Irish women in their 30s and 40s.

What startled me was this: many of them, she said, are not dependent on alcohol and they are not aware that they are consuming more than the recommended 11 standard drinks a week.

For men the limit is 17 standard drinks. Very, very easy to get through in a week without ever feeling drunk.

That gives you an idea of how tough a sell the whole idea of safe (ie not damaging to health) drinking is going to be. A great deal will depend on the credibility of health promotion.

Easily understood

So we need to know and be convinced that harmful really is harmful. We also need to have easily understood ways of defining standard drinks – not by reference to 12.5 per cent wine which you can’t buy.

I am not promoting a flippant attitude to over-drinking. As you read this, someone in an Irish hospital is only hours away from death because of harmful drinking.

What I want to see is a very careful use of language to get across a message that is terribly hard to accept. The idea that people are getting cirrhosis of the liver who are not dependent on alcohol is by no means an easy one to get across and I have no reason to believe it isn’t true, although it startles me.

Is John, mentioned at the start, engaging in harmful drinking? On that one night a week, probably. But is he a binge drinker? No, I don’t believe it.

So let’s bin the binge by dropping the word from our vocabulary as a catch-all way of describing drinking too much.

pomorain@yahoo.com

Padraig O'Morain is a counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. His latest book is Mindfulness for Worriers. His mindfulness newsletter is free by email.