Alcohol de-addiction treatment

The reason it gets ignored for years

Nobody calls a man an addict for drinking. He goes to work, he comes home, he drinks. The family adjusts around it. By the time anybody uses the word problem, it has usually been fifteen or twenty years.

What brings families to us is not the drinking itself. It is the liver report, or the shaking hands in the morning, or the day he could not stop even when he wanted to.

Alcohol withdrawal is the dangerous one

This is the part most families do not know, and it matters more than anything else on this page.

Somebody who has been drinking heavily every day for years can have seizures if he stops suddenly. In some cases it goes further, into a state called delirium tremens, with confusion, hallucinations, fever and a racing heart. That condition can kill.

Unlike chitta, alcohol withdrawal is genuinely life threatening. Please do not lock somebody in a room to dry him out. Supervised detox with proper medication is not a luxury here, it is the safe way.

What the drinking is usually covering

In a large number of our alcohol cases there is depression or anxiety underneath, or sleeplessness that started years earlier. The drink was the medicine before it became the illness.

Our psychiatrist assesses this properly. Treating only the drinking, and sending the man home to the same sleeplessness, is why so many people relapse within a month of a short admission elsewhere.

How it is treated here

Supervised detox with medication to prevent fits, monitored day and night. Blood pressure, sleep and appetite watched through the first week.

Psychiatric assessment, then daily counselling. Family counselling matters especially in alcohol cases, because the household has usually organised itself around the drinking for years and that pattern has to change too.

About four months in total, with a fixed routine. Relapse prevention before discharge, and clear guidance to the family on what the early warning signs look like.

Before you call

It helps if you know roughly how long it has been going on, how much he is taking, whether he has been admitted anywhere before, and whether there have been fits or blackouts. Bring any medicines and reports with you. None of it is essential. Ring us either way.

Nothing you tell us goes anywhere else. No name and no photograph leaves this centre without written permission from the family.

Where this information comes from

This page is written at the centre and checked by our consultant psychiatrist before it goes up. Where we describe how a drug behaves or how withdrawal works, we follow published guidance from bodies such as the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences, the National Drug Dependence Treatment Centre at AIIMS, and the World Health Organization. You can read our editorial policy.