HawkeyePierce

Thank you for bumping, I missed this the last time around. I will check it out. Thanks again.

bananagrrrl

Thank you for posting. I am going to watch them from home.

ToABetterMe11

I haven't gotten through them all, but will. That is eye opening.

littlefish

Scary....especially the young alcoholics. The girl who died. It is so hard to watch young alcoholics because I am an old alcoholic who took it gradually. It is horrible to watch the young ones shock and abuse their bodies so rapidly. And develop chronic illnesses...so quickly!

My other reaction to the series was feeling an intense desire to help them....to appear at their bedside and talk to them as a recovered alcoholic.
AA people do that all the time, but I realized I am not ready.

I am so early in recovery I don't know from one day to the next if I am healed or still sick.
That brought me to the thought that helping others recover does indeed require skills and experience and a clear method. The worse thing I imagined was sitting next to one of them in their hospital bed and just guessing at appropriate replies.

Phillips

If you search on Facebook you'll certainly form the impression that Vanda and maybe Mark also, have died since.

SSIL75

oh no, really? Not surprised at Vanda but Mark seemed so positive in the update. Thank you for the update.

stayinsober

I'm on the 5th one and I haven't seen or heard anything about AA or help dealing with the alcohol problem!!! That has me floored, What the heck they think just dealing with the health issues and telling us we're dying is enough to make us quit?? I mean most of us alkies have been through hell and back emotionally and physically but we still drank. Until we dig down and get help for our drinking nothing is gonna stop it. It's a disease and they're not working on it. Just the physical damage it's doing. This is very sad.

eddie73

Watched it last year and it didnt scare me enough to stop then. I think that the flaw in addicts is that they only remember the good times and forget the pain of addictive behaviour. If this is a disease, it is a disease of memory

DayTrader

I find it helpful now that I'm recovered to watch it....

IN my active alcoholism, I wasn't willing to be honest with myself, I wasn't willing to consider that I was deluding myself, I wasn't willing to admit I might be wrong, etc etc etc.....

But watching that now reminds me of just how delusional I WAS back then (and still can be today.....for what it's worth).

I get that same benefit here too though.....reading post after post of "newcomers" who go back out, come back in, and proclaim "that was the LAST one, now that I learned this or that trigger, I've got control of this beast now."

I also think it's beneficial for family and friends of alcoholics to watch it.....so they too can see that maybe it IS time for that intervention.....maybe it IS time to quit coddling the alcoholic in their life and let them feel some of the consequences of their actions now.......rather than shielding them from the pain of their addiction until it kills them.

SSIL75

Is that really necessary though? 1 - it's a documentary. By definition it's a fly in the wall deal. If those people aren't in AA then there is no wall for the fly . 2 - Everyone knows what to do if they want to stop drinking right? I mean it's not a mystery.

wpainterw

Thanks for posting. I want very much to see this. So please don't delete this without advance notice so folks can download if they want to. If you like perhaps a warning for persons who are depressed or might otherwise be adversely affected might be appropriate. Thanks for this thread.

W.

Dee74

The links have been up for well over a year. They're not going anywhere

D

wpainterw

Thanks Dee!
It occurs to me that what might be needed to supplement this series is one on recovery. How some alcoholics manage to recover, the various ways available to seek help. In the first days of my beginning recovery I attended a speakers' meeting and listened to a lady who was so obviously happy, completely transformed. I have never forgotten it. I thought to myself, "If I could only be like her some day!" She had somehow been touched with something almost beyond understanding. I had never seen anything or anyone like that and I think of it often.
Might there be a program in which people related their stories, told us where they had been and where they managed to get? Not a preachy sort of thing or biased in any one direction, advocating one approach over another. Just a simple story of people who survived and the way their lives changed when they gave up what was addicting them.

W.

Dee74

Good idea W

D

LaFemme

Great idea w! I believe at one point in this the doctor talks about how they are not dealing with the problem outside of the physical.

This is a very difficult program to watch...I could not get through it. I think if I had tried to watch it a year ago it would have terrified me even more...I was not deluding myself but at that time I was convinced I would never be able to quit. I would have thought I was watching my own death and I would have despaired.

Eddiebuckle

I found a link to "Rain" about six weeks ago on the web and watched all of it. It was definitely disturbing, but I felt that watching the tape played to the very end is necessary for alcoholics to see. I buried my mother in 1999 and continued to drink for another decade because I believed I was "not like her." It's so easy to ignore the physical changes that occur as this disease progresses, and to assume that while definitely a health issue, we cannot possibly die from alcohol. Watching "Rain" was a very powerful reminder that recovery is truly a matter of life and death. Thanks for posting and sharing this....

wpainterw

Hi Everyone! This SR website has an enormous reach. I believe that there are many members in the United Kingdom, where BBC made this documentary. Is it possible that there are members either in the UK or elsewhere who could approach BBC or perhaps some similar documentary maker either in the UK or the US or anywhere else, approach with this idea: a documentary showing the "bright" (i.e. recovery) side of alcoholism, that despite the horrifics, one can recover from this malady. We know it because we see people who have remained sober for extended periods of time. We're not interested in speculating about a "cause" or "causes" nor are we interested in suggesting or promoting any particular program. All that would be done would be to describe the different ways in which folks have been able to get some recovery and tell people how to follow up on this if they are interested.
I don't have the necessary connections to pursue this but there must be some members on this website who might be able to contact appropriate people and explore the possibilities.
So it's nice to hear folks saying that this might be a "great idea". It would be fantastic if someone out there would go on and say, "Let's do it and I know how we might get started!"

W.

Carrie36

I watched the whole series today. It left me feeling so sad, I watched my spouse die from alcoholic liver disease at the age of 31. It was just like that, horrific and painful.

Brought back a lot of memories for me. It also made me that much stronger in my resolve to quit drinking.

Hard to watch but so glad I did.

Phillips

I wanted to check the accuracy of this, but I now think that Mark is still alive, but pretty sure Vanda is not.

Kmber2010

I remember watching these on youtube during my first few weeks and I thought OMG....yes that is me. Some scary stuff but being an alcoholic.....didn't really shock me much. I too led years of insanity fueled with alcohol. I could see myself in the folks shown in this documentary.

I agree with W that stories of recovery would be a great thing to put out there. I couldn't find too much but I will say that SR was the only tool that I found that actually had real people sharing their stories of sobriety. Whatever form of recovery....it opened my eyes to the different options available and it gave me the hope that I needed. I know I needed a started point for the journey. I was clueless but I knew I needed help in staying sober and learning to live again.

I spent quite a bit of time reading the thread on stories of recovery and seeing how others did it. Let me know that a new life is possible.

Like many, I didn't need the horrors of drinking shown (for me I was already in the pit) but success stories of how people did get sober and what recovery was about.

Good thoughts guys!