Self-Concept and Autobiographical Memory in Alcohol Use Disorder

This study has two objectives. First, to evaluate the effectiveness of psychotherapy sessions based on self-concept and autobiographical memory in patients suffering from alcohol use disorders (AUD). Second, investigate the relationship between drinking identity and AUD. These objectives will be investigated according to a longitudinal design.

In this study, the drinking identity is evaluated on its implicit dimension and on its explicit dimension. Levels of alcohol use and dependence are assessed by the amount and frequency of drinking, the duration of abstinence, and the intensity of AUD symptoms. These assessments consist three visits: on the day of inclusion, then at three months and six months after the first visit. The psychotherapy sessions consist of four individual sessions. They are inspired by the Social Identity Mapping in Addiction Recovery (SIM-AR) by Beckwith et al. (2019), combined with autobiographical reasoning exercises.

Patients with an AUD, participants in the study, are recruited from the addiction department of the Etablissement Public de Santé Mentale de la Marne. To investigate the effects of individual psychotherapy sessions, two groups of patients are constituted randomly. The first group will have four psychotherapy sessions between the first visit and the second vist. The second group will not follow psychotherapy sessions but will benefit from the usual addiction treatments.

The first hypothesis is that patients who have completed the psychotherapy sessions will have lower alcohol consumption (frequency, quantities, peaks) and symptoms of AUD (cravings, drinking refusal self-efficacy and feeling of recovery) than those who have not benefited from the program.

The second hypothesis is that implicit and explicit levels of drinking identity will predict alcohol consumption (frequencies, quantities, peaks) and symptoms of dependence (cravings, drinking refusal self-efficacy and feeling of recovery) for all participants.