Drunkenness as therapy and social service

Dead Drunk for Tuppence

by Theodore Dalrymple

Britain is the only country known to me in which drunkenness is an ideology: that is to say in which people believe in an abstract way that, in getting drunk, they are doing good to themselves and performing an almost philanthropic service. The mass public drunkenness that appals foreigners when they come to our shores is actually thought by young drunks to be a form individual therapy and social prophylaxis rolled into one. 

I have spoken to quite a lot of these young drunks both when they are inebriated and when they are sober. Their argument goes as follows:

   Every person has things inside him that need outward expression. If not expressed, these things will turn inward cause a kind of emotional septicaemia. People with emotional septicaemia become miserable, ineffective and anti-social. Unfortunately there are many inhibitions of the things that need outward expression. Drunkenness removes these inhibitions.Therefore drunkenness is healthy to the individual and prevents the baleful social consequences of emotional septicaemia.

That resultant drunkenness is more therapy and social service than enjoyment is demonstrated by the fact that young people who get drunk in public often say things afterwards such as ‘It was a wonderful night last night,’ in proof of which they offer the fact that they can remember nothing of it. It is to be presumed, therefore, that drunkenness to anything less than oblivion is not quite so wonderful, and indeed is more a penance, though a very necessary one. 

No doubt young men have long prided themselves on their drinking habits, but women now do so as well. Here is something I found on Soulmates, the part of the Guardian website in which young men and women seek companions. (It is fascinating to read the self-descriptions on the website, which make Mr Podsnap seem positively self-doubting.) It was posted by curlygirl24 who is looking for someone who is ‘happy in their skin.’ She begins:

   I have been told am a bit of a paradox: I seem to have the emotional fuzziness that comes with being a girl along with the capacity to drink copious amounts, still stand up and take p*ss out of my friends and possibly random strangers. 

Bear in mind that this drunken rudeness, whose wit we can all well imagine, is supposed to attract a man who is happy in his skin. Personally, I find it terribly sad, almost tragic.