The media in Britain recently reported, with what read like surprise, on excessive drinking among retired professional women. Because it is only in recent times that we have had a significant number of women retiring from the professions, this appears to be a new phenomenon. But I don’t think it’s a new occurrence among men, especially among men who have had busy jobs and then retire, or among older men who live alone.
What’s interesting, and it ties in with those reports of drink problems among retired professional women, is that being well educated and in the higher socioeconomic groups are among the characteristics of people who develop alcohol problems in older age.
As the Centre for Ageing Research and Development in Ireland (Cardi) put in a report on the subject, the categories of older people most likely to have alcohol problems are “men living alone, people who are socially excluded and those in higher socio- economic groups”. Men are twice as likely as women to drink too much.
The concept of what is called late-onset alcoholism is not widely talked about, but it is a recognised issue among some older people. Causes can include chronic pain or disability, bereavement, job loss, reduced ability to take care of oneself, loneliness, or other emotional and medical issues.
Later onset alcoholism often starts with drink problems in people’s 40s and 50s. A feature of alcoholics in this group, according to Cardi, is that they tend to be well educated and that some stressful life event has caused them to start drinking, or has worsened their level of drinking.
On the positive side – and this is important to remember if you are caught in late-onset alcoholism – you are twice as likely to recover as are those whose alcoholism developed early in life. It helps that late alcoholics tend to be in better health than the early-onset alcoholics, and also that they have fewer psychological and emotional problems.
Retirement, it seems to me, is a factor when a person has been drinking too much for years but was able to keep it under control because of the requirements of work and the structure provided by the job.
Suddenly the job and structure are gone and the restraints have been pulled away. The results can be a slip into a level of drinking that comes as quite a surprise to friends and relatives but that was there as an underlying problem all along.
Retirement can also mean, for some, the loss of friends and of social standing and a fall in their self- esteem, especially if their self- identity was tied up with their work.
Most older people, of course, don’t have any kind of drink problem. Older people drink less than the younger age groups. But physiological and medical changes can lead to problems even with relatively low levels of alcohol use. While people over 65 drink less as an overall group than other age groups – and as many as 23 per cent have never drank – 10 per cent have a higher level of drinking than any other age group.
We don’t hear very much about the issue of alcohol misuse among older people. And as some of those who drink too much are men on their own, I guess that’s understandable. Lonely people don’t get to make a big impact on social groups because they are not necessarily part of them.
The established trend towards drinking at home and not in the pub probably exacerbates all this and makes the problem easier to hide.
Alcohol is one of the main contributors to falls which, of course, can be catastrophic for older people.
What I take from this is that we need to give far more attention to the emotional and psychological aspects of ageing, such as loss of work, bereavement, loneliness, pain and sickness.
The Cardi publication Focus on alcohol misuse among older people can be downloaded from http://bit.ly/alcohololder
pomorain@yahoo.com Padraig O'Morain is a counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. His latest book is Mindfulness on the Go. His mindfulness newsletter is free by email.