Alcoholics Anonymous is perhaps the most famous and popular way for those with drinking problems to combat their addiction. The organization has become so successful the term “go to meetings” and the abbreviation “AA” have also entered the lexicon as terms to describe treatment to addiction. While widespread and available treatment is normal in modern times it was not always the case.

Alcoholics Anonymous was founded in the mid-1930s. At that time is was still taboo to call drinking a disease or for people from important families to admit that they had a drinking problem. The rise of the modern alcoholism movement began in the 1940s. A centralized leadership was finally established to enact standards for treating alcoholism and to increase the general public’s awareness and understanding of the disease.

The National Committee for Education on Alcoholism provided the leadership to modernize alcohol treatment. One of the first issues that movement leaders E.M. Jellinek faced was creating an understanding of exactly what constituted alcohol abuse. It was a difficult subject to tackle because the effects of consumption depended on the individual. But by the 1960s the movement was having an identity crisis because the term alcoholic had as many as 200 different definitions. In 1957 the World Health Organization had already suggested that alcoholism had lost its clinical specificity. It urged that diagnosis of alcohol problems include terms such as alcohol addiction or alcohol habituation.

The World Health Organization findings were debated during a five-year study that was carried out by the Cooperative Commission on the Study of Alcoholism. They added the phrase problem drinker to the plethora of ways to describe alcohol abuse.

Fretting over the phrasing was part of the movement to gain a wider acceptance for the treatment of alcohol addiction. The labeling of the disease was also complicated by new discovers that wiped out previous thoughts on how and why individuals become addicted. As health professionals attempted to define alcoholism in modern terms it became clear that substance abuse and addiction involved defining a subset of personality disorders and neuroses.