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The outcomes of inpatient alcoholics who reported that they had been coerced into treatment by commitment or pressure from others were compared in a follow‐up study to those of alcoholics who described themselves as voluntary admissions. Ten assessments of control over drinking, number of drinking days in the past week, and intoxication since previous appraisal were made by collaterals between 2 weeks and 18 months after treatment. Even though the data were analyzed in several ways, the number of significant differences did not exceed chance expectations. This suggests that the prognoses of alcoholics who present for treatment under court order or interpersonal pressure were not substantially different from those of men who claim to have entered without coercion. However, the differences between the groups' Control over Drinking ratings, even though not statistically significant, consistently favored the coerced admissions, which raises the possibility that their outcomes may have been slightly better than those of the voluntary admissions.

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No abstract

Many clinical practices are based on the assumption that the posttreatment drinking of alcoholics is consistent and predictable over fairly substantial periods of time. Using a sample of 98 alcoholics, we studied the intercorrelations between controlover-drinking ratings made in 10 follow-ups covering the first 18 months after treatment. The intercorrelations were surprisingly low, particularly for periods beginning during the 1st month after discharge. Thus, it appears that control among treated alcoholics is generally inconsistent and only marginally predictable. Recidivism for the entire sample increased up to the 9th-month follow-up, after which it stabilized and even seemed to decline slightly.