By Jennifer Cunningham, "The Herald" newspaper, Glasgow, 12 May 2005

At the end of May, Lilian and Murdoch MacDonald will sit down to a meal at home in Ayr and open a bottle of wine to toast the publication of their jointly-written account of their recovery from alcoholism.

Like the archetypal alcoholic at the AA meeting, they pull no punches in describing the desperate state they reached on their worst, very nearly fatal, bender.

They woke up in the middle of the night on one of Cambridge's large greens, aching and cold, to discover the slug of gin they had been keeping to ward off the morning bleakness had been stolen, with the remains of their money.

Two young nurses, on their way home from a party, were asking if they were all right.

Alarmed at the state of this middle-aged couple, the nurses pooled their own remaining funds to buy them cups of tea and a shared hamburger, and found a hostel willing to give them a bed for the night.
 
"We probably would not have survived the night if they had not come along," says Murdoch, quietly recognising just how close the call had been.

That night was the culmination of a two-week bender which had begun when, with the unshakeable but completely unfounded confidence of the alcoholic with a new idea, they had gone to Cambridge, where Murdoch had been a student 25 years earlier, with the thought that he could undertake a PhD.

After confessing to their landlady that they had alcohol problems, they were evicted summarily as soon as they started drinking, and Lilian's account of the ensuing weeks trudging round the town finding a bed for the night, a meal, the next drink, a bench where they would be left in peace, is an object lesson in survival technique.

Ten years on, Murdoch runs a PR business from their house in Ayr, which is full of bedding plants waiting to fill hanging baskets.

The journey back started with 12 difficult months in the Cambridge hostel, during which a job selling newspapers on a street corner was a big step forward.

They also went to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and found initial friendliness followed by a cold-shoulder treatment following a relapse. Lilian also provoked anger with her determination to question and discuss some of the principles laid down in the Big Book – the AA bible.

While in the hostel, they started to examine why they had such a problem with alcohol, and Lilian started to write the story of her life. Gradually, she realised that her unhappy childhood in Lochwinnoch was the root of many of her problems.

Her father valued respectability above everything else and her mother, who had been orphaned and brought up by a resentful grandmother, was always telling Lilian she was too fat.

Early marriage and motherhood was not the blissful escape she had imagined and she added her own restrictions by dieting until she became anorexic. Then she discovered that after a couple of drinks, she would allow herself to eat normal meals.

There were many years of excessive dieting and problem drinking between then and reaching the depths in Cambridge. The recovery process for both her and Murdoch – whom she met through an alcohol counselling service – entailed reading up on psychology and piecing together their shattered selves.

At the end of it, they decided that years of AA meetings had prevented them moving on rather than helped their recovery.
 
Now Murdoch says: "We can drink safely, if we choose to. It tends to be a bottle of wine with a meal and we avoid the gin and the lager we would drink on a bender."

Their book is partly Lilian's account of her early life and their downfall and recovery in Cambridge, and part a critique of AA's uncompromising philosophy.

It will be published on May 31, just days before today's 70th anniversary of the founding of the fellowship in 1935.

Their main criticism is that most services for people with alcohol problems direct them to AA. They want a recognition that it does not suit everybody and a much wider range of options ought to be available.

As Murdoch says: "Alcoholics Anonymous and drug treatments can be useful in that they give you a buffer zone, but we think they are wrong because they are only treating the symptoms, not the problem.

"We can only talk from personal experience. We are not saying we know everything. All we can do is put our personal experience forward and suggest the significance of it.

"We want to open up discussion. AA stemmed from an evangelical group and at the time, 70 years ago, it was great. If it was a normal, developing, progressive, organic movement, open to new ideas and to change, it would be a marvellous movement.

"Everyone's different, and if people want to stop drinking and go to AA, that's fine. We want AA still to be there, but we also need a recognition that we have moved on. The only things that are common to everyone are the symptoms: we all have the shakes and we all get the jitters."

The MacDonalds believe that AA has seriously impeded progress in the treatment of alcoholism.

They argue: "Ideas which would have proved harmless in a small group, have, when promulgated by an international organisation that has been accorded a near monopoly in the field of alcohol treatment, served only to virtually halt any progress or advancement of knowledge and understanding being made in that field since 1935.

Countless hundreds of thousands of sufferers from alcoholism have been unnecessarily denied the opportunity of making a real or, in our view, radical recovery."

They acknowledge the original good intentions: "It was enlightened for its time. Back in 1935, people with alcohol problems ended up in prisons or lunatic asylums, but it seems now that the lunatics have taken over the asylum. The actual programme has not changed in 70 years," adds Murdoch.
 
Alcoholics Anonymous refuses to discuss the MacDonalds' claims. Its Glasgow spokesman says: "Alcoholism is a disease. I have a mental obsession with alcohol and a physical allergy to it."
 
Lilian suggests that if it is any sort of disease, it is a mental one. "When you get taken into hospital, you don't go into a general hospital, but a psychiatric one. The truth is staring everybody in the face. You get people sitting in AA with their arms full of cuts that they have inflicted on themselves."

Barry Jones, professor of psychology at Glasgow University, whose specialist area is alcohol abuse, says: "It is recognised that there are different types of problem drinkers and different treatments. Many people who engage with the 12-step or AA model fail. Many do well with cognitive behaviour therapy and some fail. The trick is to match the right sort of problem drinker to the right sort of treatment."