Who is most prone to become alcoholic? How is alcoholism related to the one’s profession? What is the situation in the US concerning alcoholism and professions?

All of these serious questions have a complex range of answers. First of all, alcoholism rate in US is on the slow but constant rise. Lately even so, it seems that alcoholism rate is getting faster in women than in men (although data from 2008-2010 shows that the average alcohol consumption in the US was 4.9 liters for woman and 13.6 liters for man of pure alcohol consumption on annual basis).

Job is one of the big stress sources in modern society, which leads not only to alcoholism but to other deadly habits as well such as drug abuse, and not to mention depression and other mental health problems. There are constant pressures, deadlines, working in unhealthy environment, dealing with many different kinds of people, having irregular schedules… These things are all silent killers. But, of course whether or not someone is going to become an alcoholic because of their job depends mostly on the persons him/herself:

Yet, it is not easy to answer the question of what profession drinks the most alcohol, on one hand simply because we are talking about people here, and everybody is different in sense of capability to cope with stresses and other job problems. Generally, individual factors are decisive if somebody is going to be come alcoholic such as level of education, level of social skills, enduring in stressful situations, coping with deadlines, responsibilities, and other working environment pressures. So, overall, the more stressful the job, the more likely for that profession to have greater percentage of alcoholics.

But nevertheless statistics show that there are some patterns that relate certain professions with high alcoholism rates. For the US, we have found a list of these jobs on the Insider Monkey – 18 Professions with the Highest Alcoholism Rates in US.