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Comment by xyzzy123 | Hacker News Reader

The great thing about calling it "alcohol use disorder" is that it lets you diagnose more people.

If you're a nonprofit or advocacy group, "alcoholics" are only going to get you so far in terms of funding, also dealing with them is messy and incredibly difficult.

If you can shift the overton window on whats considered "problematic" drinking you get to "educate" people and get funding for things which have fewer hard criteria or measurable outcomes than treating actual alcoholics. This keeps the money flowing.

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People think of “alcoholism” as a binary. It’s not, and the new language reflects this. We absolutely should educate “problematic” drinkers that they are on a sliding slope to an ungroovy dependency.

It also highlights that just because you were classifiable as AUD, you won’t necessarily be so classifiable for the rest of your life.

The language of alcoholism often mirrors sermons of eternal damnation. Not a particularly inspiring starting point for treatment and a big reason why most people who succeed in getting past AUD don’t do it in groups that preach this eternal damnation angle.

If it's a disorder, then it's "not your fault", it's something that's "happened to you". It removes personal liability from the choices we make.

Would you also argue that type 2 diabetes is not a disorder? Or that anorexia/bulimia are not disorders? Or that COPD is not a disorder?

It might be worth re-examining your understanding of the word disorder, because the world has moved on a bit.

God forbid they're looking at patterns of alcohol abuse that falls outside a narrow preconceived scope. "Alcoholism denial" was not what I expected to see when I woke up this morning, but here we are.

This is just conspiracy logic with no evidence that you fashioned yourself out of nothing but ugly cynicism and contrarianism.

I'm glad there's a voice of reason here (and one who put it much better than I could have). I'm failing to see the downside of being able to describe people who have alcohol dependencies that negatively impact their life without being "alcoholics" which is such a weighty term that I think makes people resistant to diagnosis.

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