The Big Book clearly shows that Bill Wilson was insane

The Big Book clearly shows that Bill Wilson was insane. Not just a little bit crazy, not funny crazy, but really crazy, genuinely insane, clinically diagnosable. Mr. Wilson was suffering from paranoid delusions of grandeur and a messianic complex, or a narcissistic personality disorder — or perhaps some crazy combination of all of them.

Wilson was insane while he was drinking: he was suicidally drinking immense, almost superhuman, quantities of cheap rotgut whiskey or gin, one or two or even more fifths of it per day — "Drinking to Die" is what A.A. calls it. In the Big Book, (chapter 1, page 5, 3rd edition) either Bill Wilson or Joe Worth wrote in Bill's Story:
"'Bathtub' gin, two bottles a day, and often three, got to be routine."


The Prohibition-era "Bathtub gin" was infamous for being poisonous. It was occasionally contaminated with methyl alcohol ("wood alcohol"), which is terribly poisonous, and causes immense neural damage, if not blindness and death.

Even ordinary uncontaminated ethyl alcohol kills brain cells. Every big drunk where you wake up with a hang-over kills roughly 100,000 brain cells. Then malnutrition and thiamine deficiency can lead to a horrifying condition called Wernicke-Korsakoff Syndrome where you suffer such massive brain damage that you lose your short-term memory and ability to learn or remember anything new.

The A.A. saying is, "John Barleycorn promises us insanity or death." And it's true.

Even Bill Wilson himself reported that problem. Bill recorded a set of autobiographical tapes before his death, which the Hazelden Foundation then used as source material to write an "autobiography" of Bill Wilson. Bill quoted Dr. William D. Silkworth as saying, in midsummer 1934, that he had originally had some hope for Bill, but...


"But his habit of drinking has now turned into an obsession, one much too deep to be overcome, and the physical effect of it on him has also been very severe, for he's showing some signs of brain damage. This is true even though he hasn't been hospitalized very much. Actually I'm fearful for his sanity if he goes on drinking."
Bill W., My First 40 Years, Bill W., page 116.