But a difference in the high-functioning alcoholic, Benton said, is the power of the denial.

You can be a high-functioning workaholic much more easily than a high-functioning alcoholic.

He is a high-functioning alcoholic who chronically arrives late to work and is on the verge of being fired.

He became a high-functioning alcoholic.

Experts call these people "functional alcoholics" or "high-functioning alcoholics."

Though several characters on the show are portrayed as high-functioning alcoholics, Jack appears to be the only one who is chemically dependent on alcohol.

A high-functioning alcoholic (HFA) is a person that maintains jobs and relationships while exhibiting alcoholism.

Here, director Robert Zemeckis smartly capitalises on Washington's easy-going star quality to show how effortlessly likeable this high-functioning alcoholic is.

In a May 2014 interview with GQ magazine, Tatum stated that he drinks too much and that he is a high-functioning alcoholic.

Crystal Meth: What You Should Know Are You a High-Functioning Alcoholic?

Stark's also a high-functioning alcoholic, and sometimes he loses control — as he did in the second "Iron Man" movie, getting so drunk that he started destroying his own mansion.

Benton, a recovering alcoholic and the author of "Understanding the High-Functioning Alcoholic," appeared on The Early Show Tuesday to talk about this face of alcoholism.

A high-functioning alcoholic (HFA) is clinically defined as someone who is able to maintain their "outside life" – such as job, home, family and friendships, all while drinking alcoholically.

Knapp won wide acclaim for Drinking: A Love Story (1996), which described her life as a "high-functioning alcoholic" and remained on the New York Times best-seller list for several weeks.

Its detectives are not brilliant, semi-autistic types; high-functioning alcoholics; or Bergmanesque depressives haunted by dark personal traumas (although the main investigator is so consumed by the job that she barely ever changes her sweater).

In recovery from alcoholism for the past five years, her book, Understanding the High-Functioning Alcoholic, published in the US in March, tells of her descent into alcoholism and her subsequent recovery.

But more important is the portrait Ms. Knapp offers of what she calls "the high-functioning alcoholic": "Smooth and ordered on the outside; roiling and chaotic and desperately secretive underneath, but not noticeably so, never noticeably so."

You can still be an alcoholic even though you have a great "outside life," with a job that pays well, home, family, and friendships and social bonds, says Sarah Allen Benton, a licensed mental health counselor and author of Understanding the High-Functioning Alcoholic.

In "Drinking" Ms. Knapp wrote about the disturbing incongruities of her life as what she called a "high-functioning alcoholic": she was an award-winning journalist, an Ivy League graduate from a well-to-do New England family and by all appearances a happy, healthy and successful young woman.