I'm considered by many folk to be a fairly heavy drinker, but 6 drinks a day, every day, is seriously indicative of what I'd call a real fucking drinking problem that one should get professional help for.
It's actually quite easy to calculate fwiw, a 'unit' is 10ml ethanol:
2pints * 0.052 / 10
= 2(568ml) * 0.052 / 10
= 5.9072 units
The disease isn't defined by any outcome other than alcohol consumption and dependence.
To be exact: his was high functionning until he wasn't. From my understanding, he had a bad week (health troubles), which spiraled into a worse one at work. He took a month off, but was so nervous and on the edge that he beat his kid, and his ex-wife told him to put himself together or she would ask for full custody (basically you only see your child two weekend a week instead of half/half).
Don't know what happened then (i had taken my distance since the divorce). The day before he had to go back to work (or the day after, not sure), he killed himself.
[edit] This is my flawed understanding of the events. It probably did not happen like this exactly, most of it was discussions at the church and after the incineration (we usually have dinner with friends and family during those times where i live).
Mostly I think unbinding basic health care in the US from employment would help with many issues. I don't know how people are supposed to be able to heal from illness while also putting in their efforts to a full time job.
Same goes for other drugs - I know a few people who are dependant on opiates or cocaine, but function just fine in society.
You can sustain a pretty serious drinking problem that will cause long term harm to your health while also remaining a functional member of society, even getting up to the bottle of scotch a day or more tier.
A fair amount of my professional peers are basically highly functional alcoholics, who have not yet reached a point where it causes sufficient impact on them to recognise the problem.
Most of those people may well have access to professional help, they just don't use it because they don't see a problem. Yet.
Standard Control:
GMV WMV
1–2 AU −0.127 −0.074
2–3 AU −0.223 −0.129
So cumulatively, 0-3 drinks is is GMV: -0.380, WMV: -0.223
What I don't know and can't seem to find with a quick search is the conversion method for IDP standard deviations in brain matter relate to absolute percentages of brain matter (which I assume is not linear?). If your comment is correct, then these numbers correlate to an absolute reduction of 2% of brain matter?
I also see that the third drink seems to do about 50% more standard deviation movement than the former 2 put together.
EDIT: Never mind it's been a while since I took statistics, I remembered that standard deviations _are_ a linear amount. I'd been thinking of percentile placement on a normal distribution.
Grey matter is about 40% of the brain, white matter is 60%, so if we're talking about absolute matter, we should factor that in.
For 0 to 3 drinks:
GMV: -0.380 x 0.4 = -0.152 SD WMV: -0.223 x 0.6 = -0.1338 SD
Should be sum of 0.2858 standard deviations of total brain matter, or about 2.5% reduction.
For 0 to 2 drinks:
GMV: -0.157 x 0.4 = -0.0628 SD WMV: -0.094 x 0.6 = -0.0564 SD
0.1192 SD or about 1.05% reduction
One glass of wine, 125 ml, at 8%, is one UK unit. Half a .75l bottle of wine at 14% would be 5.25 units.
It's not unusual in the UK for people to drink half a bottle of wine each evening, and then more on the weekends.
We drink a lot. It causes a lot of harm.