Constant alcohol consumption leads to neurosis-like and psychopath-like states. Alcoholics have an asthenic syndrome, which is manifested by physical exhaustion, sleep disturbances and severe irritability. Patients often complain of intermittent sleep, sweating and headaches, absent-mindedness, impatience. They are all lazy, uninitiative, careless and indifferent to everything going on around them.
Psychopathic disorders consist in the fact that the patients’ personality traits are exacerbated. If a person used to be neat, then because of alcoholism he becomes pedantic. Modesty turns into total shyness, cheerfulness into uncontrolled euphoria, calculating into greed.
Acute complications of alcoholism are alcoholic psychoses: alcoholic delirium, alcoholic hallucinosis, alcoholic paranoia and paranoid. These states are accompanied by confusion, disorientation in space and time, psychomotor agitation, fear and anxiety, hallucinations, delirium of jealousy and damage.
These states are dangerous for the patient and the people around him. For example, in a state of alcoholic delirium, true hallucinations occur: they seem so real that the patient’s behavior is conditioned by their content. For example, most often the alcoholic sees devils, snakes or huge insects. He tries to drive them away with a mop or to kill them with an axe. With alcoholic paranoia, jealousy delusions occur most often: the patient thinks that his wife or husband is cheating on him. This can lead to physical violence, up to and including murder.
If you find that your friend or relative is disoriented and behaving inadequately, call an ambulance immediately and leave the room to keep yourself and your loved ones safe.
How the psyche changes in alcoholism
Personality is not a stable, but a dynamic and constantly changing structure. While abusing alcoholic beverages the personality gradually degrades – alcoholic mental degradation develops.
First of all, due to the constant intoxication of the brain with alcohol, the intellect declines: memory deteriorates and mental processes slow down. The patient thinks slowly and has difficulty remembering events from the past.
The ability to think abstractly decreases and becomes more concrete and situational. Thinking is unproductive and superficial, and the patient has difficulty formulating a thought correctly and voicing a sentence. Such changes are observed in 45-70% of alcoholics.
Moral and ethical principles are ruined: carelessness arises, the sense of conscience and duty weakens, interests and hobbies are lost, egocentrism intensifies, the concept of social responsibility disappears.
Emotional disorders arise. At first, nuanced emotions are lost – these are subtle feelings, for example, sadness with a touch of sadness, surprise in a combination with interest. Alcoholics become emotionally cold people. Emotional lability arises: bawdiness shifts sharply to joy, fear to calmness.
A specific alcoholic humor appears. Jokes become flat, understandable only to the alcoholic. The topics concern drinking, which are voiced with an ironic tone: “Well, shall we drink?”, “Let’s have a drink!”, “Here we cannot do without 100 grams. Reactions to events become brutal and sometimes antisocial: there is often aggression, anger, cynicism.
