The Search for Solutions: Help-Seeking Patterns of Families of Active and Inactive Alcoholics

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Abstract
Subjectslvere 49 wives of active alcoholics and 29 wives of inactive alcoholics. The data were derived from interviews and Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventories. Findings were as follows. Families did not seek community help until several years after recognition of a drinking problem. The greater the amount of family hardship, the more help and the more kinds of help sought. Personality disturbance of the wife was not related to amount of help sought but was related to looking for help early and with spending longer periods in seeking help. Disturbance was related also to persistently seeking help from clergy. Divorce and attempted divorce were associated with higher hardship scores, greater emotional or mental health, longer duration of alcoholism and more help seeking activities. The divorced husbands had engaged in more socially deviant behavior. Families of inactive alcoholics had deferred help seeking for longer, had sought less help from fewer community agencies over a shorter time and had a single burst of help-seeking behavior rather than multiple bursts. It is suggested that investigators concern themselves with types of family behavior, their distribution and their correlates rather than with the search for behaviors common to all families of alcoholics.

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