One fifth of Sweden's children growing up have under their childhood had at least one parent who had an alcohol use disorder. Children are individually affected in different ways by the circumstances of their upbringing and it is not something that is always apparent to those outside the family circle.  It becomes a dilemma when these children's voices aren't heard. Another compounding factor can be an absence of social support and intervention often carried out by social workers. Social programs adapted to these children’s situation can help break the silence and reach the individuals hiding behind the masks put on to shield off the world outside. We were interested how individuals who had been subjected to having a parent with an alcohol disorder described their experiences and how they felt they had been affected by that circumstance. We wanted to leverage this to reach a deeper understanding of how to better support children living with this situation. This formed the purpose of the of this study and gave rise to the questions investigated. The method employed to conduct the study was a thematic analysis on six swedish autobiographies within this framework. After the autobiographies had been read, four different themes to further investigate emerged: escape from reality, consequences embodied as adults, socioeconomic situation, and relevant social work. Analyses showed that the authors were affected by difficult childhoods impacted by parental alcohol use disorders in a multitude of different ways.  By example, they devised different methods to flee their predicament as children. The results also showed these children could be found in different types of homes and strata across the spectrum of socioeconomic statuses. The now grown children also believed that their childhoods would have been improved if they had had more caring, secure adults in their vicinity to their lives otherwise filled with chaos.

In recent years alcohol consumption among the elderly population in Sweden has risen. While cooperation between elder care organisations and addiction and substance abuse organisations among individual municipalities has increased, only a fifth of Swedish municipalities have revised guidelines directed toward elder care, describing how social workers are supposed to process this part of the elder population. Meanwhile, New Public Management has caused a fragmentation in social work where organisations have an increased focus on their own areas of responsibility as well as standardised aid increasing the risk of clients not getting the aid they may need. The purpose of this mixed methods study is to understand how social workers within elder care are expected to work with elders who abuse or engage in risk-filled use of alcohol. In order to accomplish this we have chosen to study guidelines for social workers specialised in elder care. The documents are developed by 30 different municipalities found through Socialstyrelsens “Öppna Jämförelser 2021” and in addition to these guidelines, the study also aims to analyse a survey directed toward social workers in the same municipalities in order to generalise the results. In conclusion, New Public Management has provided Swedish social services with specialised social workers. Working from different offices within a municipality creates cause for cooperation to which, in some municipalities, there are not sufficient guidelines describing clear proceedings when it comes to processing elders with addiction or substance abuse.

Research shows an increase in alcohol consumption among older generations, leading to a rise in alcohol-related issues within this age group. In spite of this, there is a lack of knowledge and national guidelines regarding alcohol abuse among the elderly, resulting in complex work for social welfare officers and home care personnel who must balance the statutory self-determination rights of care recipients with a reasonable standard of living. Through 10 conducted interviews, this study aims to find out how social welfare officers and home care personnel work with alcohol abuse among elderly individuals. The data collected has been analyzed through thematic analysis, aiming to find answers on how professionals describe the work with alcohol abuse among the elderly, as well as how they balance self-determination with a reasonable standard of living. The study's result shows the complexity of working with alcohol abuse among the elderly, the lack of guidelines and policies, as well as the challenges it poses for professionals in their daily work.