Alcohol and Alcoholism Vol. 35, No. 6, pp. 629, 2000
© 2000 Medical Council on Alcoholism
Book Reviews
Counselling Addicted Women.
By M. Cohen. Sage Publications Ltd. 1999, 224pp., £25. ISBN: 0761909109.
This is an updated version of the book Getting Sober, Getting Well: A Treatment Guide for Caregivers Who Work With Women published in the early 1980s. The author describes the book as ‘designed specifically for women because biologically, culturally, and socially, their modern experience is different from that of men’. It is a good description of this resource. The book is divided into three parts: the social, cultural context of women's drinking, treatment issues, and what is described as ‘special populations’. This latter includes focusing on different age groups (the young and the elderly), colour, bisexual and lesbian women, and women who are disabled or homeless. It is well laid out with each chapter containing general information, staff training exercises (the ones on professional avoidance of this group of clients are particularly good), case studies, client training, and myths and stereotypes. There is a wealth of information on aspects, such as violence and abuse, and how these issues affect the designing of treatment programmes. Even so, it needs to be stressed that this resource does require previous training in counselling for it to be of real value. There are some good questionnaires which can be used in taking a history from new clients and the section on early, middle, and late stage treatment is a good attempt to recognize that, for many problem-drinking women, treatment needs to be viewed in the long term.
However, this is very much a book from the USA. The ‘disease model’ is the only one proposed and all treatment aims at is abstinence. The vast majority of references and all the resource addresses are from the USA. This reduces the use of the book in other countries. Other problems related to this are (1) that the three pages on the effects of alcohol on the body do not mention the differences in the size of drinks in different countries and therefore the tables on blood alcohol levels (BAC) may be misleading outside the USA. (2) The term ‘blackout’ is used as though this is a feature of high doses of alcohol. In fact, the typical ‘alcoholic blackout’ has much more to do with the severity of the drinking problem and not the BAC. Details like these do make one wonder about the accuracy of some of the other facts in the book.
In short, the exercises for staff and clients are very useful and would be of great help both for training staff and working with women who have alcohol or other substance abuse problems. The general information in the book is less sound.
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