[The alcoholic patient in Costa Rica: characteristics and results]

At the Rehabilitation Center of the National Institute on Alcoholism (CREAT) a three years study was carried out on in-patient basis. This study took into consideration the socio-economic characteristics as well as the patients' intake of alcohol and their behaviour on abstinence-ingestion when they got out during a year follow-up. This work presents a profile of the patients, having interviewed 3.175 individuals, which, in general terms, is synthetized as follows; he is an individual whose age fits him within the economically active population, coming from rural areas and whose income derives from occupations not qualified far the urban areas of the country, where he has relatively rooted. Early incorporated to his type of work abandoning his education, soon he started indulging in alcohol due to circumstances socially accepted, and congruent with the cultural pattern of ingestion. Important enough he reveals alcoholic backgrounds within the family almost always in the person of his father. At the moment of this study the patient reveals excessive consumption of alcoholic beverages, equivalent to some 230 cc of absolute alcohol. He states, clearly enough, his inability to stop his alcoholic intake once it has started, and which leads him to alcoholic binges of more than a week of endurance. He has been previously treated for alcoholism at INSA and A.A. with no positive results. His referral for treatment had been made, in the majority of the cases by his kin and friends, and, likewise, he has come to the Center by his own will. It's striking among other features, his general impairment of many of the aforementioned aspects in younger patients. The results obtained during the period of abstinence point out to a fast relapse (in several instances immediately after having left the Center) positively associated with groups of lower age. The problems of alcoholism of the patients under study are present at a great scale, involved in a double and problematic socio-cultural situation. Thus, the patients show a deficient involvement in the socio-economical structure which leaves the basic needs unsatisfied frustrating their personal ambitions. But, furthermore, their involvement within a cultural model of compulsive alcoholic drinking accounts for his abstinence to be a determinant of a deviant situation or reluctance in regards to the actual values.