Phil Collins is right — retirement Can drive you to drink
THE man sitting opposite my surgery desk is a pillar of the community. He has had a very successful career working in the City. He has a loving wife and three well-adjusted children. He can afford nice holidays and fine food.
Having worked so hard all his life, you would think that now he has retired, he is looking forward to enjoying the fruits of his long career.
Certainly, that is what you’d think if you met him socially.
But, in truth, he is an alcoholic. He drinks two bottles of wine a day. While he used to wait until evening before pouring himself a drink, his wife noticed that ‘wine- o- clock’ started earlier and earlier.
Tragically, it’s now got to the stage where he’s drunk by lunchtime.
Not, of course, that any of this is obvious to those who don’t know him. He doesn’t fall out of bars, collapsing in the street. There’s never any embarrassing behaviour.
When we think about the problems society has with drinking, we tend to think of youngsters binge-drinking — young men brawling in the street, ladettes comatose on the pavement in city centres on Friday and Saturday nights.
OR We think of homeless men, a bottle in a brown paper bag, dossing on park benches. But there is a silent group of alcoholics such as my patient. Their problem is more profound — and will shorten their life.
Like many other men and women I treat, he hasn’t quite got to the stage where he’s physically dependent yet — when the body becomes reliant on alcohol and people get the shakes if they don’t drink and can even have seizures. But he’s not far off.
On his wife’s insistence, he came to see me, but the sad thing is, he’s still struggling to admit he has a problem. The fact is his story is common. I’ve seen many people like him and, indeed, this week musician phil Collins admitted that he became an alcoholic after giving up work.
Far from the well-worn rock’n’roll tales of vodka and pills for breakfast and all- day benders, phil had retired, moved to Switzerland for a quiet life and planned to spend more time with his family. It was then his drink problem set in.
As he put it: ‘I was retired, content — then I fell. Because suddenly, I had too much time on my hands.’
Why is it so many people seem to hit the self-destruct button when they retire? What is it that this dramatic life- change does to the mind? Of course, people can develop a problem with drink at any time in life and for a wide variety of reasons. But retirement does seem to be a particularly critical point for this.
The fact is that for some people, retirement isn’t quite what they were planning. The sudden change of pace, the loss of structure and routine can leave people feeling lost, directionless and afraid.
The ready-made group of friends and daily contact based on the workplace is suddenly gone.
Crucially, for many, retirement also represents a sudden loss of identity. They have spent their adult lives defining themselves by their career and then, at once, all that is gone.
They also face the future stretching out in front of them without detailed plans on how to fill it. Hobbies have been put on the back burner for years and can be hard to resume.
AND retirement coincides with other big changes in people’s lives — children flying the nest and becoming more independent, physical health starting to falter and fail, meaning they might not be as active as they’d hoped.
All of this can lead to people reaching for the bottle in an attempt to fill the emptiness and avoid recalibrating their lives.
It usually starts slowly — what used to be a single glass of wine in the evening after a long day at the office becomes a glass of wine at 4pm. Because why not?
A glass of wine at dinner is brought forward to a glass with lunch. After all, there’s not much else on in the afternoon, is there? Then — oh go on, then — you might as well have another with dinner. Then you might as well finish the bottle.
The cocktail of being well- off, retired and bored is a lethal combination when it comes to drink.
A study published last year found drinking among the over-50s is a hidden ‘middle-class’ problem, with the higher somebody’s income, the more at risk they are. The number of over-65s admitted to hospital for alcohol-specific disorders is on the rise.
So, how do you know if you are slipping? There is a questionnaire doctors use. It asks questions such as ‘Have you ever felt you needed to cut down your drinking?’ ‘Have people annoyed you by criticising your drinking?’ ‘Have you ever felt guilty about drinking?’ ‘Do you need to drink first thing in the morning?’
Answering ‘yes’ to two or more means there could be a problem.
My experience tells me many people are surprised how their answers to these four simple questions expose a hidden battle with drink.