Alcohol and Mental Health: What's Important to Understand
Dr. Andris Saulitis, 40 years of psychiatric practice
This is not a brochure about "quitting drinking through willpower." Willpower knows how to stop an action, but it doesn't know how to answer the question of why that action was needed in the first place. This brochure is about what stands behind the glass, and about which capacity in you truly needs care when your hand reaches for the bottle.
1. What Mental Health Actually Is
When people say "mental health," they usually picture something like the absence of problems: no anxiety, no breakdowns, no sleepless nights — meaning everything is fine. This is an incorrect and very impoverished understanding.
Mental health is, above all, a capacity. The capacity to feel and experience love, acceptance, connection with another living being. This is not an abstraction or a pretty phrase for a greeting card. It is a concrete physiological reality that begins operating in a person from the first weeks of life.
Take a two-month-old infant. He doesn't yet understand words, the concepts of "mother," "care," "safety." But when his mother smiles at him, something happens inside him — not at the level of thought, but at the level of the body itself. Substances are released that make his state qualitatively different. He doesn't think "I am loved." He tastes it.
"When a child has tasted the mother's smile, that taste gives him an intoxication of endorphins. This isn't chemistry for chemistry's sake — it's the taste of being loved."
Notice the word "intoxication." The doctor doesn't use it by accident. The very first, purest experience of bliss available to a human being is not a glass or a dose — it's the smile of someone close. The chemistry in a child's body is, by its nature, the same as the chemistry of pleasure in an adult. Only in the child it's honest: it's the consequence of real connection. This is genuine well-being in its original, unfalsified form.
Here's what happens to a person afterward: as they grow up, they often lose easy access to this experience. Filters accumulate — habits of evaluating, comparing, fearing, defending. What might be called inner denial accumulates: the person stops noticing that they are loved, even when it's happening right in front of them. Life becomes a set of tasks rather than an experience of connection.
And here's an interesting fact worth noting: throughout its entire history, humanity demonstrates just how desperately it needs this feeling of acceptance. People built cathedrals hundreds of meters high — not out of practical necessity, but because they needed a place where they could feel seen, accepted, part of something greater. This speaks for itself: the craving to experience love and acceptance is one of the basic forces driving human beings, no less fundamental than hunger or sleep.
So, mental health in this context is not the absence of diagnoses and not a list of symptoms you don't have. It is a living, functioning capacity: to feel that you are accepted, and the capacity to accept and love in return. If this capacity is working — a person finds support even in difficult periods. If it is blocked — the person seeks a substitute. And this is where alcohol enters the scene.
Practical step. Today, recall one moment in the past twenty-four hours when you truly felt warmth from another person — not just remembered it mentally, but actually felt it in your body. If you can't find such a moment — that's an important signal worth working with, and the following sections are devoted to exactly that.