Treatment of Alcoholism in Australia from the 1950s to the 1980s

Abstract

Within Australian medicine, interest in the treatment of alcoholism revived in the 1950s, and in the following decade the various states introduced special legislation and established special facilities. Psychiatrists tended to dominate treatment and evaluation of treatment in this period, and state psychiatric centres continued to treat a large number of alcoholics. In the 1970s, the work of voluntary agencies was increasingly subsidised by the state, and the state services to a large extent assumed a supervisory role. In the same decade, criticism of the disease concept of alcoholism and questioning of the effectiveness of treatment began to emerge in Australia as it had overseas. By the mid-1980s, many health professionals saw treatment as a strategy of last resort and were looking to control of consumption as the primary means by which to reduce alcoholism.