Clinical implications of models for recovery from alcoholism

Various models of alcoholism are hotly championed and condemned by clinicians and theoreticians alike. Choice of model is important because it determines clinical thinking about the process of recovery from alcoholism. This paper conceptualizes the steps a patient must take to recover from alcoholism. It shows how three common models of alcoholism, the medical, the moral and the symptom, can be combined to visualize the separate tasks which must be carried out to recover from alcoholism. The distinct tasks are obscured because in clinical practice they are overlapping or simultaneous.