TURN YOUR BACK?

There is the ominously empty bottle.

There is the unconscious figure slumped across a sofa.

There is someone who is an alcoholic.

And though it is your own husband or wife or mother or father, you are agonizingly unable to do anything to help.

Where can you turn?

After you've tried your doctor, clergyman or Alcoholics Anonymous, a new book, The Alcoholic In Your Life, suggests another alternative - TURN YOUR BACK!

"When it is apparent no amount of aid is going to turn the tide", writes Jo Coudert, a writer-editor specializing in psychology, "must a strong life be sacrificed to prolong an enfeebled one? I think not. I think the choice must be made and that it must be to save the healthiest. Anything else is waste compounded."

It's a shocking point of view - but Miss Coudert speaks from unhappy experience. She's the daughter of an alcoholic mother, and she's spent 18 years nursing, coaxing, pleading, scolding. All wasted.

At the age of 25 Miss Coudert gave it up. She and her mother never lived together again although her mother lived another 20 years.

"One person can provide for another the climate for change, the courage for change, and the incentive to change," she says, "but when change still doesn't come, you must accept the alcoholic's drinking - or leave.

"It's a terribly human thing to try to do it, but you just can't save someone else," she says. "People save themselves or the're not saved.

"THE TORONTO DAILY STAR

DON SAYS: A shocking and provocative solution, but necessary for the sanity of the family. Of course every avenue must be taken to try everything possible, including enlisting the family doctor or a psychiatrist to help in the situation. I personally lived with my mother, (who with her husband adopted me at 18 months) wh0 was manic depressive. The burden on her husband and I became intolerable, and I left home at the age of 20 years and moved out of town. Partially this was done to get away from an unhappy series of depressive bouts, hospitalization, and suicide attempts by my mother. Did I do right? God only knows.