To coincide with National Depression Week, the Mental Health Foundation has released the results of its alcohol study. One in 10 people drinks every day, and the surprise spike in this figure is among the over-55s, who are much bigger drinkers than the 18-34s (15% of them drink daily, as opposed to 3% of the younger group).
The main worry, though, concerns many more people than this minority of daily tipplers. Some 88% of all respondents said they would find it difficult to give up alcohol completely. On first sight, I saw this as rather a generalised statement, but then I figured that was down to the wording of the question. If it had said instead, "How do you feel about staring down the barrel of sober socialising for the rest of your life?", giving possible answers a) desolate, b) OK and c) pretty good, we would have got a truer reflection of alcohol's place in the social calendar.
A total of 77% said alcohol made them feel relaxed. This, apparently, raises the spectre of drinkers medicating their own anxiety problems with no reference at all to healthcare professionals. I wouldn't worry too much about this; alcohol is, after all, a relaxant and therefore bound to make you feel relaxed. But then there are all the people for whom "relaxation" is the primary aim of drinking - 40% of people drink to feel less anxious, 26% to deal with depression and 30% to "forget their problems".
But alcohol is not a reliable tool against depression. Even disregarding its core characteristic - that once you've had a bit, it makes you want a whole lot more - it is a depressant, damaging the neurotransmitters that help regulate mood. And yet having "a problem" is not a very reliable indicator of depression itself, nor is the urge to "feel less anxious". If you went to the doctor with either of these concerns, you wouldn't come away with SSRIs unless you had an extremely cavalier GP.
So what people are really doing with drink is "self-medicating" - with a substance that isn't an antidepressant - states of mind that aren't necessarily depression. It might be counterproductive, sure - almost all comfort behaviour, from drinking to eating to going back to bed, is counterproductive once it takes on a certain prominence. And in an ideal world, we wouldn't need external comfort. But in the real world, we need comfort sometimes. This only becomes unacceptable when we need to pacify ourselves so often that the salve becomes our greatest problem.
But also problematic is the attitude, evinced by this study, to emotional health, indeed to health in general. The terms of this survey are extremely loose, and in effect it finds depression wherever it fancies. "Anxiety", "having a problem" and "wanting to relax" are all aspects of life. If we're self-medicating, who decided to medicalise these emotions in the first place? Once they have been medicalised, that diminishes our ability to understand and deal with them. So individual responsibility is emphasised (you are not having a glass of wine; rather you are misdiagnosing a malfunction in your own neurotransmitters), while the individual's ability to cope is undermined.
This is exactly the type of health analysis that overwhelms people. Mental health, like cancer, is presented as a dark mystery, whose tendrils have probably twined round each one of us, only we don't yet know it. The impact of individual behaviour - of drinking wine, eating faggots or not eating oily fish - is overplayed, so that we end up feeling powerless and guilty at the same time.
The final result of this is a low-level cultural buzz of hypochondria, which is exactly the kind of inchoate foe one might try to combat with a glass of wine. Surveys like this would be more useful, in other words, if they didn't exist.
