Sanity & Insanity in the Big Book

Was I crazy?

Then a mental fog settled down.

Sometimes I stole from my wife’s slender purse when the morning terror and madness were on me.

Then came the night when the physical and mental torture was so hellish I feared I would burst through my window, sash and all.

People feared for my sanity.

My brother-in-law is a physician, and through his kindness and that of my mother I was placed in a nationally-known hospital for the mental and physical rehabilitation of alcoholics.

Best of all, I met a kind doctor who explained that though certainly selfish and foolish, I had been seriously ill, bodily and mentally.

Then came the insidious insanity of that first drink, and on Armistice Day 1934, I was off again.

Rumor had it that he had been committed for alcoholic insanity.

For a moment I was alarmed, and called my friend, the doctor, to ask if I were still sane.

him physically and mentally.

We are equally positive that once he takes any alcohol whatever into his system, something happens, both in the bodily and mental sense, which makes it virtually impossible for him to

There is the obsession that somehow, someday, they will beat the game.

How often have some of us begun to drink in this nonchalant way, and after the third or fourth, pounded on the bar and said to ourselves, “For God’s sake, how did I ever get started again?’’ Only to have that thought supplanted by “Well, I’ll stop with the sixth drink.’’ Or “What’s the use anyhow?’’ When this sort of thinking is fully established in an individual with alcoholic tendencies, he has probably placed himself beyond human aid, and unless locked up, may die or go permanently insane.

His physical and mental condition were unusually good.

No person likes to think he is bodily and mentally different from his fellows.

The idea that somehow, someday he will control and enjoy his drinking is the great obsession of every abnormal drinker.

Many pursue it into the gates of insanity or death.

We doubt if many of them can do it, because none will really want to stop, and hardly one of them, because of the peculiar mental twist already acquired, will find he can win out.

So we shall describe some of the mental states that precede a relapse into drinking, for obviously this is the crux of the problem.

Here was the threat of commitment, the loss of family and position, to say nothing of that intense mental and physical suffering which drinking always caused him.

Whatever the precise definition of the word may be, we call this plain insanity.

But there was always the curious mental phenomenon that parallel with our sound reasoning there inevitably ran some insanely trivial excuse for taking the first drink.

The insane idea won out.

Such a man would be crazy, wouldn’t he?

However intelligent we may have been in other respects, where alcohol has been involved, we have been strangely insane.

I rather appreciated your ideas about the subtle insanity which precedes the first drink, but I was confident it could not happen to me after what I had learned.

Then came the hospital with unbearable mental and physical suffering.

I saw that will power and self-knowledge would not help in those strange mental blank spots.

For most cases, there is virtually no other solution.’’ Once more: The alcoholic at certain times has no effective mental defense against the first drink.

Hence we are at pains to tell why we think our present faith is reasonable, why we think it more sane and logical to believe than not to believe, why we say our former thinking was soft and mushy when we threw up our hands in doubt and said, “We don’t know.’’ When we became alcoholics, crushed by a selfimposed crisis we could not postpone or evade, we had to fearlessly face the proposition that either God is everything or else He is nothing.

What a state of mental goose-flesh that used to bring on!

Business failure, insanity, fatal illness, suicide— these calamities in his immediate family embittered and depressed him.

Post-war disillusionment, ever more serious alcoholism, impending mental and physical collapse, brought him to the point of self-destruction.

God had restored his sanity.

There are those, too, who suffer from grave emotional and mental disorders, but many of them do recover if they have the capacity to be honest.

Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. 3.

From it stem all forms of spiritual disease, for we have been not only mentally and physically ill, we have been spiritually sick.

When the spiritual malady is overcome, we straighten out mentally and physically.

The insanity of alcohol returns and we drink again.

In this way we tried to shape a sane and sound ideal for our future sex life.

To sum up about sex: We earnestly pray for the right ideal, for guidance in each questionable situation, for sanity, and for the strength to do the right thing.

For by this time sanity will have returned.

Under these conditions we can employ our mental faculties with assurance, for after all God gave us brains to use.

Show him the mental twist which leads to the first drink of a spree.

He will match your mental inconsistencies with some of his own.

Show him, from your own experience, how the queer mental condition surrounding that first drink prevents normal functioning of the will power.

If your talk has been sane, quiet and full of human understanding, you have perhaps made a friend.

The alarming physical and mental symptoms, the deepening pall of remorse, depression and inferiority that settled down on our loved ones—

Sometimes there were screaming delirium and insanity.

It may be slowing him up mentally and physically, but he does not see it.

He is violent, or appears definitely insane when drunk.

If he is already committed to an institution, but can convince you and your doctor that he means business, give him a chance to try our method, unless the doctor thinks his mental condition too abnormal or dangerous.

We have found nothing incompatible between a powerful spiritual experience and a life of sane and happy usefulness.

Nothing will help the man who is off on a spiritual tangent so much as the wife who adopts a sane spiritual program, making a better practical use of it.

We, who have recovered from serious drinking, are miracles of mental health.

You can see that he is mentally and physically sick.

Being somewhat weakened, and faced with physical and mental readjustment to a life which knows no alcohol, he may overdo.

There was an insistent yearning to enjoy life as we once did and a heartbreaking obsession that some new miracle of control would enable us to do it.

As we became subjects of King Alcohol, shivering denizens of his mad realm, the chilling vapor that is loneliness settled down.

Again it was the old, insidious insanity—that first drink.

His sanity returned and he thanked Alco_9781893007161_6p_01_r6.qxd 8/13/07 10:55 AM Page 155

He had, of course, the familiar alcoholic obsession that few knew of his drinking.

There was much talk about the mental state preceding the first drink.

He got in touch with a prominent psychiatrist who had undertaken certain responsibilities for the mental health of the community.