Smart-Drinking concept helps in alcohol de-addiction: Expert
Neha Saini
Tribune News service
Amritsar, January 28
Fighting the battle against alcoholism and shunning the age-old method of hitting the bottom, city-based neuro-psychiatrist Dr JPS Bhatia has launched the smart-drinking concept at his hospital. Promising a road towards recovery with a non-confrontational approach and focusing on imparting life skills to the patient and his family, the concept works on recognizing alcoholism as a disease.
“The most difficult process in recovery is to acknowledge that alcoholism is a problem and unlike drug or substance abuse, people usually tend to take ‘social drinking’ to be a normal tendency. Most time, the patient is not willing to come for rehabilitation unless it’s too late. So, the smart-drinking concept works out in a way that the patient does not need to come for counseling or be admitted to the hospital. Total abstinence is also not required during the process,” he informed. He explained that the programme works as a process intervention, based on family counseling and empowering them with life skills to begin with small changes at home with the patient. “In popular recovery programmes, we only talk about 10 per cent of addicts who fall a prey to alcoholism, and the other 90 per cent that fall between the high risk and vicious drinking stages are not focused upon. We use indirect counselling through family members, children and the close circle of the patient to help him understand and realize that he has a problem. In most addicts, alcohol replaces the set of life skills required to lead a balanced life and the morally and socially judgemental attitude from the family too aggravates the problem. Here, we try to engage the family to be more receptive, sensitive and fight the stigma together,” he said.
The concept presented is being attempted for the first time in India, claims Dr Bhatia. He has been working with a few of his patients using the Smart-Drinking project and 4 per cent of them have already shown recovery. He also openly criticized the role of policy makers as promoters of addictive behaviour at the leadership level. “When people ask me why Punjab is always in conversation for drug and substance abuse, I tell them it’s because we do not have a good leadership to make strong decisions to check it. We lack in policy-making, leadership levels to combat the problem and also do not have enough resources to push our rehabilitation programmes to adopt a patient-friendly atmosphere. That’s the reason why most state rehab centres are lying vacant, because even they have failed to see the problem as a bio-psycho-social disease.”
