Our patient journey this week is from a man who nearly ruined his marriage and the health of his wife through excessive drinking (doi:10.1136/bmj.d956). “Having been afraid of the effect on me if my wife found out about my drinking, I had never imagined the devastating effects on her. Suddenly I seemed to her a fraud.” With a supportive family and general practitioner, the anonymous writer seeks and gets help, and the story has a happy ending: “I prefer to be a steady non-drinker who takes the odd glass. It seems to be working.”

But not all such stories have a happy ending. In their editorial on …