Why do US women have the highest rate of alcoholism in the world?

19 comments

1. Your link is kinda messed up. But if I had to hazard a guess, drinking in America is more egalitarian for the sexes and even socially encouraged for women with stuff like ladies’ night out, wine moms, etc.

2. I have no idea, but I would wonder about the reliability of numbers like this in general as I imagine it has a self reporting component. It might be that women are as much a part of drinking culture here as opposed to some other nations. I really don’t know.

3. Because they have to deal with US men!

   /s

4. Equality between men and women in society means we drink similarly. Former Soviet countries have an extremely long history with vodka and alcoholism. It was subsidized by the government in an effort to keep the population distracted.

5. Florida, Texas, Idaho. I rest my case.

6. Could you fix your link?

   The sources I’m finding are US data only and have about 4% American women as alcoholic, not 10% and I can’t find any international numbers that control for methodology of measurement. It’s the kind of thing that I’m sure can be measured in many ways, so as a first assessment I’d like to see your source.

7. It’s probably because of all of those flavored vodkas and Mike’s hard lemonades.

8. There is a whole ‘wine mom’ culture. I’ve known too many new mom who rely on alcohol to get through the day.

9. Yeah I’d take that with a grain of salt. I don’t trust the WHO to be unbiased or objective

10. I have very little faith in the methodology if* the UK has a lower prevalence that the US.

11. >WHO

    Lol.

    [The National Institute for Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism puts the number at 3.8%](https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/brochures-and-fact-sheets/alcohol-facts-and-statistics) as of March.

    As of 2019, the CDC’s estimate was [in line with that at 4%.](https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/fact-sheets/womens-health.htm)

12. Ask my Aunt. She makes moonshine.

13. Because of U.S. men.

14. I thought Russians do

15. Bitter bitch syndrome

16. Places with very drunk men need sober women to take care of them?

    I’ll also point out that alcohol is just one of many substances to be abused. In many places in the world other things are easier and cheaper to obtain.

17. They don’t. What’s going on here is that you’re conflating a particular data set involving one particular disease classification code with “alcoholism.” Different countries differ in their analysis, record keeping, and reporting. My opinion is that the American healthcare system incentivizes reporting patients’ conditions under as many different codes as possible due to the need to bill insurance companies, whereas other countries with different (i.e. universal) healthcare systems have different concerns.

    For people who have trouble accessing the OP’s link, [try this one instead](https://tinyurl.com/ks4k3h4t) and go to the “Data” tab. As /u/bearsnchairs remarked, one might wonder about a data set that says 7.7% of the adult US population is alcohol dependent but only 1.4% of the adult UK population is alcohol dependent.

    “Alcohol dependence” is defined in this particular table (see the Metadata tab of the OP’s link) as:

    >Adults (15+ years) who are dependent on alcohol (according to ICD.10: F10.2 Alcohol dependence) during a given a calendar year.

    If your medical system classifies you as alcohol dependent using this particular code, then you will be counted as alcohol dependent for the purposes of this particular WHO dataset. If you are dependent on alcohol but are classified under some other code, then you will not be counted as alcohol dependent for the purposes of this particular WHO dataset.

    Why might someone dependent on alcohol be classified under something other than ICD.10:F10.2 (Alcohol dependence)? Because an “alcoholic” might well show up in a medical system for something other than “alcohol dependence.” If you look at [the WHO’s version of ICD-10](https://icd.who.int/browse10/2019/en#/F10-F19), there are a number of subdivisions of F10 (Mental and behavioural disorders due to use of alcohol) that one would associate with alcoholism that fall outside F10.2. And here’s [the CDC’s list of alcohol-related ICD codes](https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/ardi/alcohol-related-icd-codes.html) that they use to analyze the impact of alcohol on public health. As you can see, the codes cover a wide range of diagnoses associated with alcoholism but that are well outside of one particular disease classification code.

    Edit: Had to replace the URL to the WHO page with a TinyURL because the WHO actually uses parentheses in their URLs (!) and that completely screws up Reddit’s Markdown system.

18. According to this…

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_alcohol_consumption_per_capita

    America is 45th in alcohol consumption globally. Unless women here are drinking hundreds of times more then men there is something wrong with how your statistic was collected.

    It’s been my experience that many Europeans don’t consider their drinking to be disordered because they consider it “drinking culture.” I’ve argued with Brits who said that their NHS’s definition of disordered drinking doesn’t count as alcoholism because it’s so common to drink more then that. In other words the argued their government’s healthcare system is wrong because over-drinking is so commonplace it shouldn’t be considered disordered. So perhaps many of the respondents don’t claim or consider themselves to be alcoholics despite how much or often they drink.

19. idk if the data is skewed or what but at least in my area there’s not a massive drinking culture for men or woman.

    Tbh when I was in England I saw much more drinkers with more quantity and frequency than in my area of American so idk what their definition of alcoholism is.