[Patterns of alcohol consumption among families with chronic somatic patients]

This paper intends a description of family climate likely to be found in low-class low-earnings sectors, sick persons suffering from chronic somatic pathologies are living in. The biopsychosocial model was the analysis model researchers selected to carry on the study: It allows the detection of risk situations connected with the different ways a family milieu casts its influence when an unfavorable evolution of the illness involved is at stake, i.e. when the development of such an illness slips from doctors's expectations. In the patients sample population under study, the incidence of "alcohol consumption within the family group" variable was deemed as one of the heaviest factors when the somatic illness worsens. Among those families where an active alcohol consumption could be detected, two alternative solutions were, also, likely to be found at the same time, namely: a family continued consumption pattern, and a family discontinued consumption pattern. Among the former consumption, alcohol appears as a central organization motive round which all group rules and norms center. Instead, the patient involved is confined to marginality, and deprived from the least psychophysical care as well. Quite contrary, among families where alcohol consumption was eventually ousted, organization patterns feature solidarity, and care to the patient involved.