Outcomes in Treated Alcoholics PATIENT AND TREATMENT CHARACTERISTICS IN A ONE YEAR FOLLOW-UP STUDY

(1942) reviewed pubb'shed studies of alcoholism treatment observing that "the medical profession at large is unable to form any. sort of opinion... as to the value of conventional psychotherapy in the treatment of alcoholism". A review of evaluative studies by Hill and Blane (1966) more than 20 years later reached a similar conclusion. They pointed out that "the bulk of the. studies are gross retrospective surveys.... with reliance on unreliable and unvalidated superficial measures, with inadequate follow-up procedures " and that only two are prospective or planned studies. Obviously, there is a need for more adequate follow-up studies Journal of Alcoholism 9 4 of treated alcoholics. This paper reports a large study of 968 treated alcoholics using pre- and post-treatment measures of drinking and social behaviour, follow-up data and an "alcoholic involvement " scale with established reliability and con-struct validity. Current knowledge about the psy-chotherapeutic treatment of alco-holism is still incomplete. Very few studies have.been done using the same measuring instruments in a variety of facilities. An exception would be the. study of alcoholics treated at eight outpatient clinics re-ported by Gerard and Saenger (1966). This study found that four character-istics were associated with improve