So much for the existing public methods of dealing with the alcoholic. The most usual private method is for a man's family or friends, when he has lost control, to send him to some place where he can "get a grip on himself." But he often does not receive in such a place, any more than in the hospital or prison, that specialized treatment which can make that regained grip effective. General treatment, accompanied by a gradual withdrawal of stimulant, will restore his bodily strength, with the result, in nine cases out of ten, that when he emerges from the seclusion he is able to drink more than he was before he was sequestered, and will be sure to come to grief more quickly. In most cases his craving and need for stimulant are in no degree decreased, and in consequence he will frequently relapse while going to the railway station on the homeward journey. An even graver danger is that, while still in full possession of the alcoholic habit, he will in addition contract the hypodermic habit, and any drug habit developed in the alcoholic is the most difficult of cases to deal with successfully. If he does relapse, his friends will almost surely hold him blameworthy and impatiently abandon him as hopeless, believing everything to have been done which can be done. In reality nothing at all useful has been done to help him. He is a sick man, and no attack whatever has been made on his disease.
COMPLETE MENTAL CHANGE MUST PRECEDE REFORM
This brings us to the kernel of the matter. No man who has become addicted to the use of alcohol can possibly abandon it unless he has first undergone a complete mental change, and in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred this alteration of the mental state will not come until he has experienced a physical revolution. The reason for this is simple. Excessive use of alcohol really deteriorates body and brain tissue, and tissue degeneration transforms for the worse the entire physical and mental make-up of a man. The confirmed alcoholic is in the state which, save in rare instances, nothing short of specialized medical treatment can correct. Mere general building up of bodily tone is as ineffective with alcoholics as is enforced deprivation or punishment.