Steven J. Wolin

Resilience Among Youth Growing Up in Substance-Abusing Families

This article presents the Challenge Model, a new clinical paradigm for evaluating the children of alcoholics and other substance-abusing parents. Unlike traditional risk paradigms, the Challenge Model incorporates both the resilience and the vulnerabilities that can result from struggling with hardship early in life. A developmental vocabulary of strengths is provided for pediatricians to use in research, clinical thinking, and treatment and prevention efforts with COAs.

Marital Interaction during Experimental Intoxication and the Relationship to Family History

Over the past two years we have been collecting information on selected intact families in which alcoholism has persisted formany years, often over several generations. The orientation of the project is based upon an interactional model of chronic alcoholism in which problem drinking is viewed as an adaptive response to specific intrafamilial issues and is retained to provide interactional continuity.

Hallucinations During Experimental Intoxication

Hallucinations commonly occur during the course of prolonged alcohol intoxication and withdrawal. As noted by Alpert (1970), theories regarding the etiology of this phenomenon usually distinguish those hallucinatory episodes which demonstrate a latent schizophrenia unmasked by alcohol from those perceptual sequelae secondary to the physiologically hyperexcitable state of withdrawal. On retrospective questionnaires (Alpert, 1970) and in clinical studies of subjects experiencing acute withdrawal psychoses (Victor and Hope, 1953, Gross, et al., 1963, 1966, 1970, 1971) alcoholic hallucinations demonstrated little relationship to an underlying schizophrenia. Because they are commonly sensory in character, associated with diminished light and sensory input, and spatially oriented these events seem quite distinct from the emotional state caused by alcohol and the personality of the drinker.