Alcohol abuse and dependence as a loss of the stretch-and-fold capacity

The non-linear version of the Taiwanese Alcoholism Screening Schedule (TASS) was designed (NLTASS) and evaluated through the adaptation of the Rössler model, due to the rigidity of the usual psychiatric diagnostic schemes.The 24 symptom-nodes of NLTASS were applied in 407 Taiwanese patients. The track of the mechanical time of the TASS was transmuted into fractal time. The requirements of the three variables and parameters implicit in the Rössler´s differential equations were fulfilled through the different numerical expressions of the NLTASS-symptom-nodes.It was empirically demonstrated that the 288 non-alcoholic Taiwanese patients showed a stretch-and-fold healthy attractor, while the trajectories of the NLTASS-symptom-nodes of the 46 alcohol abusers and 73 alcohol dependents tend to exhibit unbending, inactive and self-degraded patterns.We concluded that the performance of the chaos theory in the diagnosis of alcoholism simply points out the limitations of the linear, determinist, reductionist approach in the attempt to describe the alcohol abuse and dependence.