She credits Allen Carr’s manual The Easy Way to Control Alcohol with helping her break free aged 33, as well as therapy and meditation. Whitaker, now 40, details her own path to recovery in Quit Like a Woman, which is part examination of how patriarchy drives women to drink and part practical guide on how to tackle addiction. Getting accurate figures for alcohol treatment programmes is hard because many participants want to remain anonymous, but a former Harvard psychiatry professor Lance Dodes claimed in his 2014 book, The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry, that it was effective for between only 5% and 8% of people. A long-term study on AA (a free mutual-aid society that has about 40,000 members in the UK) by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism in 2011 found that 49% of its members were still abstinent after eight years. Some have challenged its belief that alcoholism is a disease, while others have questioned the religious aspect of the organisation, which asks members to turn their lives over to a higher power as part of the 12 steps. While Whitaker is keen to point out that “plenty of my friends have gotten sober through AA”, it is not without its critics. Since it was founded in 1935 by Bill Wilson and Bob Smith in Akron, Ohio, AA has become the most popular addiction recovery programme in the world. That’s not women or any other marginalised human.” The archetype is a man with an overdeveloped sense of owning the world. They’re for the people who sit at the top of our society. How, she wondered, could this possibly serve women or minorities who historically have been powerless? “These are rules written for men in the 1930s. The programme’s guidelines, created in 1939, centre on appealing to a higher power and renouncing the ego. But, after several months of attending meetings, she realised that the 12-step programme wasn’t working for her. She did what many people with a drinking problem do: she went to Alcoholics Anonymous (AA).
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