Dealing With Drink : Alcohol and Social Policy; From Treatment to Management

by Betsy Thom

This book examines the social, political and health policy contexts within which alcohol treatment policy has emerged and changed since 1950. Three themes are highlighted as particularly relevant to an examination of policy the emergence and evolution of a policy community spear-headed by psychiatrists in the 1960s but broadening to include other professions and the voluntary sector by the 1980s; the role of research which influenced the nature and direction of policy; and the changing conceptions and competing paradigms of the problem tracing the effect of ideological shifts on the balance between treatment responses and prevention and public health approaches to complex social medical problems such as alcoholism. Within these broad themes, the book portrays the pressures and tensions on government departments, the efforts to secure consensus in the formulation and implementation of policy and the importance of understanding the historical-social contexts from which policy emerges.

266 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 1999