Jakob Hein is a bestselling author and works as a psychiatrist in Berlin. He was a senior physician in the Clinic for Psychiatry and Psychotherapy at the Berlin Charité and has been a practicing child and adolescent psychiatrist for over ten years. His new book will be published next week: “Drunk Behavior: An Ethnological Trip Around the World.” However, Hein didn't write the book, he translated it. The original is from 1969 and was written by the two American ethnologists Graig MacAndrew and Robert Edgerton. The two researchers examined the question of how people around the world behave when they are drunk. The result: Not what we would expect in the West. A finding that has hardly made it into science today.
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Photo: Noah Wedel / imago images/Noah Wedel
In the “Moreno+1” podcast, host Juan Moreno talks to Jakob Hein about the unusual findings of the two researchers, who dispel many prejudices surrounding alcohol consumption. "It's not alcohol that's responsible for what we do when we're drunk - it's what we as a society consider acceptable," says Hein. Depending on the character and expectations of a society, the intoxication behavior of its members changes. »I am not of the opinion that an act committed under the influence of alcohol should fundamentally be treated differently legally. “That is simply not scientifically tenable,” says Hein.
Listen to the full episode now.