Including family meetings in your treatment of alcohol-using patients (or any psychiatric patients, for that matter) can help you better understand treatment challenges and therefore help achieve long-term sobriety. But it can be awkward to facilitate such meetings, especially if you haven’t done many. This fact sheet presents some useful tips. From Treating Alcohol Use Disorder: A Fact Book (2023).

Disulfiram is an aversive treatment, causing a buildup of ethanol’s metabolite acetaldehyde in the serum, which in turn causes symptoms such as flushing, dizziness, nausea, and vomiting if patient consumes alcohol. Since disulfiram does not reduce cravings and any alcohol ingestion could result in a reaction, noncompliance can be common. Its use should be reserved for selective, highly motivated patients in conjunction with supportive and psychotherapeutic treatment. From Treating Alcohol Use Disorder: A Fact Book (2023).

Research has shown that consistent attendance at Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meetings is at least as effective as any other treatment, and possibly more so. The two key ingredients of AA meetings are: ⦁ Making positive changes in social networks ⦁ Learning coping skills to maintain abstinence when in high-risk social situations. From Treating Alcohol Use Disorder: A Fact Book (2023).

Alcohol use disorder (AUD), as defined in the DSM-5, includes 11 criteria. While most experienced clinicians can diagnose AUD without going through a formal checklist of DSM symptoms, we suggest you try using this sheet during interviews. You are likely to find it helpful in at least two ways. First, you can use the criteria to more accurately categorize the severity of your patient’s AUD: ⦁ Mild: two DSM-5 criteria ⦁ Moderate: three to five DSM-5 criteria ⦁ Severe: more than five DSM-5 criteria Second, you can use the criteria to show your patient that there are relatively objective medical symptoms leading to the diagnosis of AUD. This lessens the stigma attached to the diagnosis and shows that you are a well-trained professional, enhancing your credibility and hopefully helping your patient trust your recommendations. From Treating Alcohol Use Disorder: A Fact Book (2023).

Regardless of what kind of treatment you choose for your patient, it’s important to remind yourself of the key feature of any successful treatment—a good treatment alliance. From Treating Alcohol Use Disorder: A Fact Book (2023).

A key ingredient of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) for alcohol use disorder is discussing automatic negative thoughts that may trigger drinking (see “Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Techniques in Alcohol Use Disorder” for more information). This is a template of a worksheet you can use with your patients to facilitate this technique. Typically, you and your patient would fill out one of these worksheets together during a visit, and then you would ask your patient to do this exercise at least once every week as a homework assignment, and to bring the completed worksheet to the next visit for discussion. This template includes an example from the vignette discussed in the CBT fact sheet. You can download this template and adapt it as needed for your practice setting. From Treating Alcohol Use Disorder: A Fact Book (2023).

An intervention is a planned meeting with the patient, the family, and usually an addiction professional (an interventionist). The purpose is to confront a patient reluctant to seek treatment with information from family and friends in the hopes of encouraging treatment seeking. From Treating Alcohol Use Disorder: A Fact Book (2023).

This fact sheet is specifically for long-term medication treatment to decrease use and to prevent relapse. See the individual medication fact sheets for details on each first- and second-line medication listed here. Other fact sheets focus on medications for alcohol withdrawal. From Treating Alcohol Use Disorder: A Fact Book (2023).

This fact sheet suggests a typical flow of questions during a conversational initial assessment of a patient’s alcohol use. While many of these questions can be used to establish a DSM-5 alcohol use disorder diagnosis, they are not explicitly tied to the DSM-5 criteria. To conduct a more formal interview based on the DSM-5, see “How to Ask DSM-5 Focused Questions in Alcohol Use Disorder.” From Treating Alcohol Use Disorder: A Fact Book (2023).

Families or friends of patients may ask you for advice about what they can do to help their loved one with alcohol use disorder (AUD). Some will be quite desperate for help, and may themselves be suffering from psychiatric illness— possibly aggravated by the patient’s behaviors. In this fact sheet we give you an overview of the different things you can suggest for family members. Some of these options are covered in more detail in individual fact sheets. From Treating Alcohol Use Disorder: A Fact Book (2023).