The End of My Addiction

signal contributions to French industry and foreign trade not only as managing director of Helena Rubinstein but in the same role, some years after his retirement, at the great couture fashion house Balenciaga, which he helped revive from difficult times. Above all, when he died in 1991, there was a chorus of praise for him as a “tzaddik,” a righteous man.
     
    Caught in the grip of relentless anxiety and the distorted perceptions it created and reinforced, I strove mightily not to cause my mother more pain. And I failed. During my binges, I could grow self-righteous and paranoid. I spat verbal abuse at my mother—at my brother and sister and dear friends, too. When my mother urged me not to drink, I said things like, “You are intolerant. You are like a Nazi.”
    In such moments she customarily spoke to me with forbearance, tenderness, and passionate concern for my well-being. But she struggled, and her occasional outbursts of exasperation and anger were part of the toll that addiction takes on everyone who loves a person who suffers from the disease.
    As June advanced, she begged me to see a psychiatrist she knew.
    I was not eager to see him. “This guy does not specialize in alcoholism or addiction treatment,” I told her. “I have seen the best experts and gone to the best rehab centers. But right now there is no effective treatment for alcoholism. What is the point of going to a psychiatrist’s office so that he can urge me to stop drinking? You do that very well on your own.”
    “Maybe he can help you.”
    After several such discussions, she finally wore me down.
    She made the appointment and went with me. I was half drunk when we arrived, but there was a long wait and I grew impatient. I turned to my mother and said, “Look, I’ve had it,” and walked out. She and a nurse ran after me and brought me back, and the psychiatrist gave me a sedative. A few hours later, I woke up in a Paris hospital where I had done one of my internships.
    I said I wanted to go home. “You can’t,” said the hospital staff. “This is the psych ward, and you are here HDT.”
    “What are you talking about?” HDT was hospitalisation à la demande d’un tiers (hospitalization at the request of a third party), which requires the signatures of a family member and two physicians and means that one is considered dangerous to oneself or others. Less than a year after being locked up in a psych ward in New York thanks to my friends, I was meeting the same fate in Paris thanks to my family. The experience induced a sense of despair and of a complete loss of trust between the family and me.
     
    After a couple of days, I wasn’t allowed to leave, but I could make phone calls. If the full HDT procedures were followed, I would be there for quite a while. In addition to the indignity of being locked up against my will, that was going to cost me a lot of money, because I hadn’t been back in France long enough to qualify for universal health care coverage.
    I called my mother, and she came to the hospital with my brother and sister. We had a conference with a woman psychiatrist, the vice-chairman of the hospital’s department of psychiatry.
    “Look at what you’ve become,” the doctor said to me.
    “What do you mean?”
    “You’re not even making a living.”
    “That may be. But my income in the U.S. was probably much more than your hospital salary, and I could always go back,” I said.
    “That’s true,” my mother said, before the psychiatrist could reply. My mother might criticize me in private, but she would defend me to her last breath against the rest of the world.
    The conference with the psychiatrist was futile. She said that I had been admitted to the hospital according to a strict legal procedure that had to take its normal course, and my family concurred.
    My family went home, and it seemed that I was stuck. But shortly afterward there was a little hubbub in the ward because an official from the Ministry of Justice was making a semi-annual visit to listen to patients’ concerns. At first I thought, “What’s the point?” But my second thought was, “What do I have to lose?”
    A number of other patients were ahead of me. When my turn came, I saw that the official was a woman in her fifties with an austere yet kind look. I told her, “The situation is absurd. I am a diagnosed alcoholic. I’m not in denial of the fact. I have been to the best places in the world for alcoholism treatment. And as a