When you see someone in the street drinking something out of a brown paper bag, you automatically assume that they are drinking alcohol, although it is difficult to pin point back to when it actually took off. We can though confirm that the ideology of alcoholism dates back to 1849 when Magnus Huss first linked the consumption of alcohol to serious health conditions.
The word alcoholism itself was not actually recognized in the US until the late 1930s, through the formation of the alcohol support group known as Alcoholics Anonymous or AA as it is sometimes referred to. AA does not actually give alcoholism a concrete definition, but recognizes it as something between an allergy and an illness with a team support method of accountability and responsibility being a way to control alcoholism.
The first Doctor to classify problems in chronic alcoholics was E. Morton Jellinek from New England. He defined an alcoholic as being a person who through the consumption of such large quantities of alcohol, had resulted in dramatic effects on his or her bodily and or mental health. These changes would also end up affecting the alcoholic’s personal relationships and or their employment capabilities.
He therefore concluded that treatment was necessary and nothing much has changed since then except that the definition has been slightly altered by a number of medical affiliations. The word alcoholism is currently referred to by the American Medical Association as a particular chronic primary disease.
Some in the medical profession like Herbert Fingarette and Stanton Peele who really fall into the minority will not class alcoholism as a disease and it is more common for critics of the disease theory to classify the harmful effects of alcohol consumption as a result of heavy drinking.
So the definition of alcoholism remains an uncertainty meaning that it is extremely hard to detect, especially as there isn’t much to separate an alcoholic from a person who just drinks on regular basis. I am afraid that this debate will just have to continue and if you want to participate in finding a solution then you need to investigate what is going on over at the stopdrinking.org blog as this seems to be the only place which is putting an effort at all into finding the answer.
