DRUNKENNESS: SYMPTOMS, CAUSES, CONSEQUENCES, TREATMENTS - PSYCHOLOGY - 2025

The ebriorexia is an eating disorder that includes problems related to alcoholism with other more typical of anorexia or bulimia. It consists of an excessive intake of alcoholic beverages, at the same time that calories consumed with food are restricted to avoid an increase in body weight.

Drunkenness was first mentioned relatively recently, in 2008. However, its symptoms were common long before. People who suffer from it suffer a great fear of gaining weight or gaining weight; and they generally have a distorted image of their own body. Therefore, they decide to consume fewer calories than they should or make themselves vomit after eating to avoid gaining weight.

Source: pexels.com

These symptoms are common to almost all eating disorders. However, in drunkenness they are complicated by the fact that the person also has excessive and dangerous consumption of alcoholic beverages. Many times the two problems are reinforced, thus affecting health in a very severe way.

Drunkenness can occur in people of all ages, sexes, and conditions; but according to the few studies that exist in this regard, it is three times more frequent in women than in men. In addition, most of those affected are between 17 and 25 years old, something that occurs in a very similar way in other similar disorders.

Symptoms

As with most psychological disorders, drunkenness is not characterized by a single symptom, but by a set of interrelated symptoms. Next we will see which are the most important.

Excessive concern with body image

Possibly the most important symptom that people with drunkenness share is intense concern with maintaining a certain image and body weight.

These individuals believe that they need to look specific to be okay, and they imagine all sorts of dire consequences if they don't, including social isolation and rejection by others.

Generally, the ideal state for people with drunkenness is not realistic. When measured against a standard that is practically impossible to achieve, these individuals are never satisfied with their image, and therefore resort to increasingly extreme and dangerous behaviors to try to modify it.

To all this is added a distorted perception of the image itself. Those who suffer from drunkenness tend to look overweight or even obese even when they are extremely thin, which increases their psychological distress and leads them to act in ways that are even more harmful to their health.

Use of control strategies

A symptom closely related to excessive concern for body image is the adoption of control strategies to try to keep it within the parameters that the person considers acceptable. These strategies can vary from case to case, but are generally very detrimental to your physical well-being.

In the less severe versions of drunkenness, the person suffering from the disorder will simply stay on a constant diet. Generally, your eating habits will be very severe, which can cause a significant lack of nutrients or loss of energy due to consuming fewer calories than necessary.

However, there are also much more dangerous versions of drunkenness. In most cases, those affected consider that dieting is not enough, so they decide to adopt more extreme measures. These generally involve skipping meals (or stopping eating directly), or vomiting what has been ingested to avoid gaining weight.

High alcohol consumption

So far, all of the above symptoms are common to the vast majority of eating disorders. What makes drunkenness unique is the high alcohol intake of people who suffer from it. In most cases, this is so high that it could be considered that the patient suffers from alcoholism.

As if this were not enough, generally people with drunkenness are aware that alcoholic beverages are very caloric, so after ingesting them they feel even more guilty and worried, and they resort again to their control strategies.

In practice, this can mean that those affected by the disorder hardly eat solid foods and practically only ingest alcohol, which of course has extremely negative consequences for their health.

Intense emotional distress

A very common last symptom in people with drunkenness (and other similar eating disorders) is the presence of extremely negative and unpleasant emotions, thoughts and sensations. Generally, control strategies and alcohol intake are precisely an attempt to make them disappear, although often without success.

Thus, the affected people usually have low self-esteem, irrational ideas about themselves, anxiety and symptoms of depression. These symptoms are often caused by your impossible standards for what your body should be like, and they become more pronounced as the disease progresses.

Causes

As in the case of other dysmorphic or eating disorders, it is not very clear why drunkenness occurs. However, most experts believe that the main reason has to do with the mentality of the person who suffers from this problem.

We have already seen that the main symptoms of drunkenness have to do with the presence of unrealistic and impossible to achieve standards of behavior and body image. This seems to be caused by a series of irrational beliefs that lead the person to believe that they need to be perfect to be well.

In this way, those affected by drunkenness tend to believe that if they do not reach their goal weight or achieve the image they want to have, all kinds of negative consequences will appear in their life: from social isolation to loss of health, passing by a multitude of imaginary situations in between. To avoid this, they end up developing the typical symptoms of this mental illness.

It is not known exactly why this mentality can appear, but certain factors are known that can make its development more likely. Thus, among other things, genetics, intimate relationships of the person, or having suffered harassment situations increase the chances that an individual develops drunkenness.

Consequences

If not treated in time, drunkenness can have really serious consequences for the physical and mental well-being of the person. Some of them are similar to those of other eating disorders, while others are unique to this disease.

On the one hand, the fact that the individual does not ingest as many calories as he should can lead him to enter a state of underweight, which in extreme cases could put his life at risk. The same occurs with the lack of nutrients associated with the strict diets that people with this disorder usually follow.

As if this were not enough, in drunkenness the typical health problems of an eating disorder are aggravated by excessive consumption of alcoholic beverages.

Alcohol not only worsens the physical health of those affected, but also causes their mental state to deteriorate rapidly, aggravating the rest of the symptoms and causing them to enter a destructive spiral from which it is increasingly difficult to get out.

Finally, in very extreme cases the mental distortions suffered can be so serious that they lead the person to suffer severe episodes of anxiety, depression or even psychotic outbreaks. On some occasions, those affected may even attempt suicide to end their suffering, with which they do not know how to deal.

Treatments

Generally, the treatments for drunkenness have two parts. In the first, an attempt is made to alleviate the most serious symptoms of the disorder so that they stop putting the person's life at risk. The second, on the contrary, focuses on solving the underlying causes of the problem with the aim of making it disappear completely.

Depending on the severity of the case, the first action to take may be to hospitalize the affected person. This is done in situations where the patient's state of health is really serious, such as if her low body weight or high alcohol consumption can put her life at risk.

Once the patient's physical condition has stabilized and his life is no longer in immediate danger, there are several treatment options that can be applied. Generally, all patients affected by drunkenness would benefit from psychological treatment of some kind.

The therapies that have been most effective in treating the psychological causes of this eating disorder are cognitive-behavioral and acceptance and commitment or ACT. At the same time, on some occasions, the use of medication to control some of the more acute mental symptoms may be indicated.

Finally, although treating alcoholism can be very difficult in some cases, interventions such as support groups or twelve-step therapies have proven to be very helpful in this area.

References

1. "Ebriorexia" in: Instituto Castelao. Retrieved on: September 26, 2019 from Instituto Castelao: institutocastelao.com.
2. "Do you know what drunkenness is?" in: El Botiquín. Retrieved on: September 26, 2019 from El Botiquín: elbotiquin.mx.
3. "Drunkenness: symptoms, causes and treatment" in: Psychology and Mind. Retrieved on: September 26, 2019 from Psychology and Mind: psicologiaymente.com.
4. "What is alcohol or drunkenness?" in: Very Interesting. Retrieved on: September 26, 2019 from Muy Interesante: muyinteresante.com.
5. "A new eating disorder: drunkenness" in: Vitónica. Retrieved on: September 26, 2019 from Vitónica: vitónica.com.