A brief P.S. to my reply to Freshstart57.
Although I have replaced my alcohol dependency with a dependency on dogs, an "illness" which is apparently chronic and irreversible (see Caroline Knapp's similar experience recounted in her book, "Pack of Two"), I hope I have not spread "misinformation" by dogmatically failing to recognize that, as I have said elsewhere, there appear to be a number of paths up Mt. Fuji. Nonetheless, again speaking from my own limited experience, I have found some of those paths to be expensive (even though in earlier times psychiatric fees, like college tuition, were more modest) and, again in my limited experience, certainly risk laden. Indeed, at times I have thought of that region in England's Lake District where tourists are invited to walk down what is called the "Striding Edge", a knife edge ridge where there is a sharp drop off on either side. Once in Peru I found myself at such a place, a narrow path above a town called "Pisac". The cliff at the side dropped down to a stream about 500 feet below. I asked the guide what happened when tourists fell down there and he answered that if they were foreigners "we leave them there". Alcoholism is a dangerous, foreign land. Horatio, in Shakespeare's "Hamlet" was wise to caution the hero not to follow his father's ghost too closely for
“What if it tempt you toward the flood, my lord,
Or to the dreadful summit of the cliff
That beetles o’er his base into the sea,
And there assume some other horrible form,
Which might deprive your sovereignty of reason
And draw you into madness? Think of it:
The very place puts toys of desperation,
Without more motive, into every brain
That looks so many fathoms to the sea
And hears it roar beneath.”
So I didn't intend to be "dogmatic". And I also hope that this debate hasn't cast me as the elephant. If you're grasping at me, I hope that at least you're not "pulling my leg"!
W.