Can I talk to my GP about how much I'm drinking without it affecting my insurance or appearing permanently on my record?

GP notes are medical records and are not routinely shared beyond your treating team without your consent. If you are worried about documentation, naming that directly at the start of an appointment is entirely reasonable — your GP can explain what goes where. In practice, most GPs treat alcohol conversations as a health discussion, not a report. If it feels like a barrier, say so — that changes the tone of the consultation.

What treatments actually work for alcohol use disorder in Australia?

Several medications have a strong evidence base in alcohol use disorder and are available in Australia: acamprosate, naltrexone, and disulfiram are the main options. They work by different mechanisms — reducing cravings, blocking the reward response, or creating an aversive reaction to alcohol. They are not widely known because the condition itself is chronically undertreated. Your GP can discuss whether any of these fits your situation, alongside talking therapies and structured alcohol support programs.

One in five of us — what we still get wrong about addiction

What just happened

Two researchers from Monash University published a piece in The Conversation today laying out what Australian medicine and culture still consistently misreads about addiction. Professor Dan Lubman — Director of Turning Point and the Monash Addiction Research Centre — and Associate Professor Shalini Arunogiri, an addiction psychiatrist, bring clinical and research authority to a question most people manage in private.

The numbers they open with are worth sitting with. Approximately one in five Australians will develop a substance use disorder across their lifetime. People with alcohol use disorder wait an average of eleven years before seeking treatment. That gap is not primarily a function of service access or GP availability. It is a function of what the eleven-year period feels like from the inside — which is shame, not symptom recognition.

The piece lands today because these numbers are not improving. And because the person most likely to encounter something like this is not trying to understand a stranger. They are trying to understand themselves, or someone they live with, or someone they have watched change.

The both-and

”But isn’t addiction at least partly a choice?”

This framing has dominated the cultural conversation for long enough to feel like common sense, and it is not entirely without foundation — the initial decision to use a substance often involves agency. But Lubman and Arunogiri are pointing at what the research shows about what happens after that initial exposure: the trajectory from use to disorder is substantially shaped by factors that have little to do with character. Genetics, early trauma, social isolation, co-occurring mental health conditions, and the neurobiological response of the brain’s reward systems to repeated substance exposure all contribute — and all reduce voluntary control over time in ways that are now well-documented.

The reason this framing matters is not that it is an insult. It is that it delays care. People who understand their alcohol use as a willpower problem tend to wait until their lives visibly collapse before considering that a medical conversation might help. The eleven-year treatment gap is not an average of people who could not find a GP or a treatment program. It is an average of people who decided, over and over again across more than a decade, that they had not yet earned the right to ask.

The piece also addresses what counts as addiction in the first place. Physical or psychological dependence is not the same thing as addiction — a distinction that matters in general practice. Someone who becomes physically dependent on a prescribed opioid following a surgery does not necessarily have an addiction. The difference lies in the loss of control over use, the continued use despite harm, and the degree to which the substance has reorganised life around itself. Conversely, addiction to gambling or gaming involves no substance at all — the same neurological reward circuits are engaged, with the same patterns of compulsion and consequence.

”Are there effective treatments most people don’t know about?”

Yes, and the gap between treatment availability and treatment uptake is one of the more under-discussed problems in Australian general practice. A 2023 meta-analysis in JAMA found that pharmacotherapy for alcohol use disorder — principally naltrexone and acamprosate — demonstrates effectiveness comparable to medications for depression and hypertension. These are not experimental drugs. They have been in clinical use for decades, and the evidence base is substantial.

The reason they are not widely known is structural rather than scientific. Alcohol use disorder is systematically undertreated in primary general practice. Brief screening for hazardous or harmful alcohol use is underused — partly because consultation time is short, partly because both GP and patient often sense the discomfort in the conversation and redirect away from it. The consequence is that most people who would benefit from pharmacological support for alcohol use disorder never have the conversation that would surface that option.

Turning Point estimates that most people with substance use disorders eventually recover — and that many do so without formal treatment. This is a finding worth naming clearly, because the cultural narrative often implies that addiction is permanent and treatment is a last resort. Neither is accurate. Recovery is common. The routes to it are varied. The role of formal treatment — including medication — is to shorten the path and reduce the harm accumulating in the years before it.

2 cents

For anyone in the gap — the years between knowing something is not right about how a substance fits in your life and actually saying it out loud to someone — the research framing here is useful not because it changes anything practical today, but because the way we understand a problem shapes whether we feel entitled to ask for help with it.

Eleven years is a long time to manage something quietly. General practice — a routine appointment with your own GP — remains the most accessible entry point in the Australian healthcare system for this kind of conversation. A proactive GP will ask about alcohol as part of a general health check using a brief validated screening tool. A non-judgmental one will not attach more clinical weight to the answer than the evidence warrants.

If the conversation feels impossible to initiate, naming that directly is enough: “I find this hard to talk about.” That sentence alone changes the register of what follows. The evidence on effective treatment is there. The barrier is rarely the treatment.

Verdict: yes — the research is AU-grounded, the eleven-year statistic is current and sobering, and the framing of addiction as a health condition with effective treatments is one every person managing alcohol or substance use in private deserves to encounter.

Sources cited

The Conversation — We still misunderstand addiction. Here’s what you should know. Lubman & Arunogiri, Monash University, July 5 2026. https://theconversation.com/we-still-misunderstand-addiction-heres-what-you-should-know-284428
JAMA — Pharmacotherapy for Alcohol Use Disorder. Witkiewitz et al., 2023. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2023.19761
Turning Point — Alcohol and drug treatment service, Monash University. https://www.turningpoint.org.au