Alcohol and Autism

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Or lets talk math.
The stommach is about two liters? (Manguessing, too drunk to look it up *kidding*)
A shot is usually 40% and 4 centiliters (sometimes 6).
Apart from the alcohol being deluted by the way down, once it reaches it's let's see 40/200? 0.2%, 4 cl makes it 0.8%.
I seriously doubt that 0.8% alcohol would kill anything.
Sure, at the immediate hit it would have a higher concentration, but not in the long run.

/Mats

Or is it 4/200?
I'm too tired for this...

/Mats

I had my first alcoholic drink (a can of lager or something) aged 19, and I was completely unimpressed. I hardly drank alcohol at all for the next 20 years, but when I did, I often got into an awful state drinking on my own in the early hours of the morning. On two or three occasions, I drank almost enough to kill myself in all probability.

At around age 40, I had a horrible crisis or breakdown which I'm sure was somehow related to autistic burnout, which resulted in my quitting my job and living on the breadline for most of the next two decades (£500-£600 per month). During this period I developed a drinking habit (wine and beer) which is still with me, but I learned how to handle it, and probably became some sort of 'functioning alcoholic'. I can easily drink a bottle of strong wine per evening and remain essentially lucid, though I have to face the fact that this will probably catch up with me in the end...

I don't drink very much, but I don't completely abstain.
It was never much of a social lubricant because I didn't do anything social.

I'll have a drink with my beau, or on holidays with family.
Very occasionally I'll have a drink after a bad day (maybe a couple times a year).
I can take it or leave it.


My relationship with alcohol overall:

My parents and grandparents were the generation that loved to drink.
When I was growing up, everything was a party or an excuse for them to celebrate.
There weren't any mean drunks, but it still made me very uncomfortable.

When I got older I knew two 'mean drunk" alcoholics who manipulated me.
They both did drinking and driving and other scary / dangerous things.

Now I won't associate with people who risk my life.

Sorry for nagging, but,
If 40% alcohol, like vodka or whisky would kill bacteria in the gut, lets assume that, would 5% beer or 10% wine do it?
Why aren't manufacturers of hand sanitizers made aware of this? It would make a ton of money for them to not have to distill the liquid to 90%!

/Mats

I hate living in a society where everyone drinks alcohol (I say "everyone" as it puts emphasis on the extremely high majority of people that drink, but to a teetotaler like me it feels like everyone).

I sometimes get depressed about it, because I feel like being teetotal (without being religious or ill) is wrong. I want to enjoy being teetotal but I feel guilty instead, because of societal pressure. Sometimes I feel embarrassed to tell people that I don't drink, and I shouldn't have to feel embarrassed. But some people make such a big deal about it, even adults in their 30s and 40s. They look at me in awe and ask me a dozen questions like they're trying to solve a very mysterious scientific puzzle or something. "Don't you ever even have one?", "what do you do with your life if you don't drink?", "when did you last have a drink?", "are you a Muslim or Jehovah's Witness?"
One time I was at a wedding and there was apple juice available, and I poured myself some and other people laughed at me and asked, "how old are you??" - which was another way of saying "you're not a child, you should have alcohol!"

I'm fed up with getting teased and expected to drink alcohol all the time. Why can't I be teetotal and be happy with myself? Plus I'm on 50mg of antidepressants, so there's another reason on top of the other reasons I listed here why I don't drink.

And I don't want to hear "just have one then". I sometimes do have just one but people still freak out because I'm not getting drunk. Why be drunk? All it makes you do is break social rules - which normally NTs hate! Yet they worship this magic potion that practically makes them break social rules. I've been around drunk people enough in my life to realise that they don't notice or react to social cues very well, they talk nonsense, they behave immature, they're freaking annoying, they make embarrassing spectacles of themselves, they can be aggressive, they lack empathy, they're way down in the uncanny valley...and all this is appealing to NTs?

I guess that us introverts starts to loosen up, and become less afraid to engage in discussions etc after a few.
And in an environment where everybody is acting a bit off, being drunk, it's less awkward being different. I mean, if someone is dancing on the table wearing a lampshade on his head, flapping your hands isn't really that "weird".

/Mats

I'm lucky as I don't have the gene/s which make one an alcoholic. I drank hard in my early days but only at parties. It really did nothing much for me socially other than to remove me from the real world for a while. I haven't drunk at all for a couple of decades or so now. I don't enjoy it like I once thought I did and I hate the taste of all alcoholic drinks. I'd rather drink a gallon of fresh-squeezed orange juice. When I have a hankering for citrus I can be addicted to it for a day. At social events now I only drink strong coffee (and quite a few cups/day at home). I'll never forget my first hangover. I started out on orange and screwdriver (learner's drink) and ended up drinking the screwdriver neat. The vomiting kicked in about half an hour after finishing the bottle and the periodic hanging out of my bedroom window dry retching for the rest of the night would have been hard to beat on the self-punishment scale. My friends called around about 1PM the next day to get me out of the house and go on a drive. I felt like I was going to die - I couldn't even face a plate of scrambled eggs that day.

I cannot consume ethyl alcohol, as I lack an enzyme that breaks it down in my system. If I was to consume a quantity of it, I would literally bleed to death internally. I found this out after a “friend” spiked my soda for “fun” and I had to be rushed to the E.R. for care decades ago. I spit up quite a bit of my blood before I got there. It was not a fun time for me. He got to pay my hospital bill.

I have to be careful working with it in the lab as the vapor is just as toxic to me as the liquid. I wear gloves when I handle it. Many people just do not understand why I cannot drink with them. I tell them I will do so if I get to pick what they get to drink first (methanol, two tablespoons full will kill humans) before me. That way we both go out in a similar way, in agonizing pain.

There are many reasons why I don't drink, but one of them is that I feel happier consuming food and drink that I "trust", and alcohol is not something that I trust. If there's the slightest chance that I might feel unwell after consuming a certain food or drink, I will not consume it. And everyone says "oh you won't be sick if you just have one or two drinks" but sometimes having very little alcohol like that doesn't really count as drinking, as when I say drinking I mean getting drunk. I'm afraid that if I get drunk I will have a hangover and I'm terrified of vomiting. Hangovers are awful, as people have often pointed out. It's like giving yourself a stomach flu but without being contagious. Why do that?

I remember when I was about 17 or 18 I had a couple of glasses of white wine. Delicious taste, and because I had eaten beforehand it didn't really make me drunk, I just felt a little dizzy. But then I developed a very bloated stomach and felt extremely gassy (as in flatulence) and felt sick. It was a good thing I was at home and not out at a bar with a stomach like that.

I almost never drink alcohol. I won't drink it:
- when I have to drive on the same day;
- when I have to bike on the same day;
- when I am at home and there no birthday party, and there is no beer left.
When I organize a birthday party I will drink it, bot not more than 2 glasses of beer. After that, when the birthday party is over, and there is beer left, I will drink two glasses a day, until no beer is left.

I would enjoy a half pint or pint at the lunch stop on a long cycle ride back in the day. I drank four points of beer once and did not enjoy it and kept to a half pint or perhaps a pint.

In my twenties I noticed I might say something which I then thought was childish or immature if I wasn't careful.

Work took me to Northern Ireland at the turn of the century and I made a policy decision I would abstain from alcohol, to protect myself from the risk of saying the wrong thing in the wrong place and ending up in a difficult situation. I enjoyed the occasional half when on holidays away from the province.

I saw a programme in 2003 on BBC3, where Richard Hammond, a responsible moderate drinker and a member of the public who abstained agree to swap lifestyle for a period. They both did regular liver function tests. Richard started to get better and better results as the experiment went on while the former teetotaler's tests showed liver function declining, not seriously, but enough to measure and enough of a trend to suggest caution was required with alcohol, and on the back of that data I made the decision to abstain and enjoy flexing my not giving a stuff muscle.

I will have 2 beers after work to deal with sensory issues I've masked all day and slow my ADHD brain a tad to process them (or at least that's how it feels).

But not more because I have work the next day.

When i'm off work (like today), I'll drink far too much I think as a form of 'safe' self harming and to supress my SPD.

Then hate myself tomorrow as it's a depressant, so the cycle will repeat.

But at least i'll get an uninterrupted nights sleep swings and roundabouts

i don't have the alky genes, my life would have turned out differently had i those buggers.

i inherited my cloth stomach from my late mom, who once got so upset my late dad that she drowned her sorrows in a can of beer, just one mind you, and a few hours later found herself having lied down asleep in the middle of the hallway at 2 in the morning.

My entire 39 years, I have drunk maybe 20 units of alcohol total

Alcohol doesn't particularly interest me, but I am not against it

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However I imagine or suspect that a disposable number of autistics have (addictive personality)

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Please look up "addictive personality autism"