Alcohol counseling may aid domestic abuse therapy

For heavy drinkers in treatment for domestic violence problems, an extra therapy session targeting alcohol abuse may help to speed overall improvement in violent behavior, according to a new study.

Alcohol can lower inhibitions and impair judgment, according to lead author Gregory Stuart of the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. "One theory is that alcohol can narrow focus to negative aspects of the environment, and is linked to impulsivity," he told Reuters Health.

Men who are arrested for domestic violence are usually referred by the court to group educational sessions called batterer programs, which don't always address alcohol - even though drinking is involved in a high percentage of domestic disputes, experts said.

Because previous research has found these programs especially ineffective for batterers who also have drinking problems, Stuart's team set out to test whether adding a therapy session devoted to alcohol would affect both drinking and violent behaviors over the course of a year.

For the trial, the researchers recruited 252 men who had been arrested in Rhode Island for violence against an intimate partner and who reported binge drinking (having five or more drinks per occasion) at least once a month.

All attended the court-mandated standard battery program, consisting of 40 hours of group educational programs split into 20 sessions, and half of the men attended an additional 90-minute one-on-one substance abuse session with a therapist.

The men were then asked to complete a survey about their behavior at 3, 6 and 12 months following the treatment program. The researchers also gathered any police reports relevant to the study participants, and analyzed only data for men who had intimate partners at the beginning of the study period.

On average, all of the men participating in the study reported lowered overall violence levels after one year, Stuart's team reports in the journal Addiction.

But participants who received the extra alcohol counseling session had greater short-term improvement in both violence and alcohol consumption compared to men in the standard batterer program.

When the researchers looked at specific aspects of partner violence, for example, men who received the alcohol intervention were less physically aggressive toward their partners at the three-month mark, and less psychologically aggressive at the six-month mark.

The alcohol-intervention group also drank less per day at the three-month mark and drank less often at the six-month mark.

But at every checkpoint in the study, there was little difference in overall frequency of partner violence in both groups, and after a year, the levels of physical and psychological aggression among men in the comparison group caught up to those of the men in the alcohol therapy group.