Stuck at home during lockdown, we needed something to mark the passage from day to night and “locktail” hour did exactly that. Whether your chosen drink was an Old Fashioned, a glass of merlot, a beer, or a classic G&T, it was all too easy – with no commute to get up for the following day – to let that one sundowner drift into two, three, or more. And it seems that that’s been a hard habit for many of us to kick.
Earlier this month, Professor Julia Sinclair, chairwoman of the addictions faculty at the Royal College of Psychiatrists, warned that these changes in drinking habits could mean millions of people are at risk of what she called “silent harm” from dangerous levels of alcohol consumption.
Figures from February 2020 suggest that around 12.4 per cent of the population were drinking at a level that indicated increasing or higher risk. By October 2021, the number of people drinking at that level had increased to around 18 per cent.
And experts don’t anticipate that changing any time soon. “The best-case scenario would be that suddenly everyone goes back to drinking as they were doing at 2019 – but we’ve discounted that because people aren’t going to do that,” says Prof Sinclair. “Our most realistic scenario is that the higher-risk drinkers go back over the next probably five years to where they were.”
Dr Parker says we are now at a point where we can clearly see the impact that lockdown and the pandemic has had on drinking habits – and how that has translated into health issues. “We predicted there would be an increase in harmful drinking in the first lockdown,” he says. “But actually, we found that most people were drinking the same or less. We put that down to the fact that the majority of harmful drinking tends to be in social situations, but when pubs and clubs are closed, that reduced.”
However, they did find that an estimated one in five people were drinking more, and generally those people would be categorised as those who had characteristics that put them more at risk of this. “In common parlance, you might call it an addictive personality,” says Dr Parker. “But we might also talk about someone who has impulse control or decision-making issues.
“People with these types of problems are often more likely to be sensitive to the stress of the pandemic, whether that’s the existential threat of living through a global pandemic, job insecurity, financial insecurity, family problems – it’s all stress that can lead to an increase in drinking. Compounding this was that fact that lockdown meant social support networks – whether friends, family or professionals, something that we know is critical when dealing with addiction issues – were not as accessible. The result was a perfect storm for these susceptible people.”
And although these individuals were a minority, Dr Parker points out that they have had a significant impact in hospital settings. “Speaking to colleagues in hospitals, looking at the Office for National Statistics figures and figures from other observers, we can see that the number of deaths related to alcohol, and the number of people presenting with alcohol-related liver disease and other alcohol-related problems, is the highest on record.”
The combination of this data and Professor Sinclair’s stark warnings paints a gloomy picture about the impact that the pandemic has had on our drinking culture and the ongoing repercussions we will see for years to come.
