Female alcoholics need help, not vilification

If you’re a woman with a drink problem, you get the wrong sort of attention – too much from the media, not enough from support services

‘Where can female drinkers – ashamed, vilified, and often even blamed for abuse they are subjected to – turn for help?’ Photograph: Alamy

Many women choose to drink at home. My friends and I drink too many bottles of wine at home. My alcoholic grandmother drank and died at home in the late 1970s. This is nothing new.

Public Health England statistics show there has been a 65% rise in the number of women over 60 being treated for alcoholism in the past five years. This comes hot on the heels of a survey earlier this month which found that women are more likely than men to drink a whole bottle of wine at home on their own. Both findings were part of much wider reports, which in fact showed that men drink more than women in all other contexts. Yet the media preferred “Women drink alcohol on their own” as the take-home message. They must all still be reeling from Bridget Jones.

In my novel The Other Ida the alcoholic protagonist has a habit of wetting the bed while she is drunk. I found it hard to write and I find it hard to write it again here; I am scared you will think I am attention-seeking, brash, or gross. But alcoholism isn’t any prettier for women than it is for men.

If you are a woman searching for advice about alcohol, you’ll probably find Drinkaware (a charity set up by the alcohol industry) at the top of the Google search results, with its special female-friendly page, telling you that drinking causes wrinkles and offers tips for hosting dinner parties. Yet the women who most need help do not host dinner parties. An alcoholic woman reaching out for help is unlikely to find her experience accurately reflected on the site. And the fact that in a list of side-effects, cancer is listed below “wrinkles” and “sexual performance/fertility” is not only exasperating – it’s dangerous. Alcohol campaigns largely target younger women, yet the risk of breast cancer – which peaks in the 60-64 age group – increases by about 7% for every unit drunk per day.

With public health messages focusing on drinking in pregnancy and the likelihood of being raped while drunk, is it any wonder that we drink at home? At home a stranger won’t get angry if we have a small glass of wine when pregnant. At home – we are led to believe – we won’t get raped. But while we are so quick to blame women who drink (and so often this is wrapped up in phoney concern), alcohol services are overwhelmingly geared towards men.

In my 20s I drank a lot at home. I knew I drank too much but figured it was a symptom of the chronic depression I was suffering from, not the other way round. It was a shock when an NHS psychologist said he couldn’t help, and was going to refer me to another service. Anxious, miserable 23-year-old me turned up at a King’s Cross address to find it was a drop-in centre for street-drinking alcoholics. The room was full of men with long matted beards, talking to themselves, staring at me, the whole cliched shebang. I was the only woman there. They couldn’t fit me in that day and, of course, I never went back.

Alcohol services in general are male-dominated – it has been suggested that Alcoholics Anonymous may not be as helpful for women as men. Their philosophy of submitting to a “higher power” can serve to further reduce the self-esteem of female alcoholics, and women – who often drink alone – might not find the group camaraderie so helpful.

This is the reality of alcoholism for women as well as men. But where can female drinkers – ashamed, vilified, and often even blamed for abuse they are subjected to – turn for help? The fancy infographics and fuzzy advice on the Drinkaware site? The horribly stretched NHS? Or AA (if they can handle opening up among men)? For its part, the government has announced it won’t be proceeding with minimum unit pricing. The truth is, women and men alike are dying of alcohol-related liver disease at alarming rates.

So what’s the answer? I would stop bullying women who drink, scrap the dinner party tips, cut the warnings about wrinkles and weight gain. Instead, I’d provide women with the facts about alcohol, clear advice about where to turn when they really do need help, and the targeted services to back it up.

Women of all ages who drink need to feel able to leave their homes, and for help to be there when they do.