Can you re-brand alcoholism?Can you re-brand alcoholism?
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Stuart Butler and Phil Walton discuss whether renaming alcoholism as alcohol use disorder actually helps with stigma, diagnosis or recovery. Their chat weighs clinical language against lived experience, focusing on how people want to describe their own relationship with alcohol.
1:00:54•9 Nov 2026
Can Changing the Name of Alcoholism Really Help Recovery?
Episode Overview
- Changing alcoholism to alcohol use disorder may add clinical clarity, but can also confuse the public and feel overly medical.
- Placing alcohol problems on a spectrum risks giving people an excuse to minimise their drinking and delay seeking help.
- The word "alcoholic" carries stigma, yet many in recovery still find it a clear and honest way to describe their identity.
- Some medical rebrands, such as replacing offensive terms like "spastic" or "mental retardation", clearly reduce harm and improve respect.
- People in recovery should be free to choose their own language, whether that’s alcoholic, sober, or another term that feels right to them.
“If there was one word I could use that people understood as, ‘you’re a person who doesn’t drink because alcohol is bad for you,’ I’d use it.”
What drives someone to seek a life without alcohol? This conversation between host Stuart Butler and former co-host Phil Walton zeroes in on that question by asking something surprisingly tricky: can you really re-brand alcoholism? The chat kicks off with life updates – kids off to university, GCSEs looming, and the everyday worries of parenting – before sliding into the main topic: the shift from calling someone an "alcoholic" to using the term "alcohol use disorder" (AUD).
Stuart shares openly that he’s nearly nine years sober and still describes himself as "an alcoholic who has alcoholism," while Phil brings in his NHS and healthcare background to unpack where the term AUD comes from. Together they weigh up whether the new label helps or hinders. Phil reads clinical definitions of "hazardous" and "harmful" alcohol use, and they discuss the idea of AUD being mild, moderate or severe.
Stuart admits that talk of spectrums might let people minimise their drinking, saying he could easily have convinced himself he was "at the lower end" back when he was struggling. Both question whether softer language really encourages people to seek help earlier, or simply medicalises something that many already find hard to admit.
They go wider too, looking at other rebrands in health: manic depression becoming bipolar disorder, mental retardation becoming intellectual disability, and how language like "spastic" was once common and is now rightly seen as offensive. That contrast helps them ask whether alcoholism actually needs a makeover, or whether clarity matters more than comfort.
Underneath the humour and confectionery analogies (Marathon vs Snickers, anyone?), the heart of the chat is identity: how people in recovery choose to describe themselves, and why that choice should be theirs. If you’re wondering what label fits your own relationship with alcohol, this episode might make you ask: do the words really matter, or is what you do next the important bit?
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