Stay extremely desperate and become alcoholic (9)
I believe the answer is:
deferment
'stay' is the definition.
(thesaurus)
'extremely desperate and become alcoholic' is the wordplay.
'extremely' means to remove the middle letters (only the extremes of the word are used).
'desperate' becomes 'dire' (I've seen this before).
'and' is a charade indicator (letters next to each other).
'become alcoholic' becomes 'ferment' (I can't explain this - if you can you should give a lot more credence to this answer).
'dire' with its centre removed is 'de'.
'de'+'ferment'='DEFERMENT'
Can you help me to learn more?
(Other definitions for deferment that I've seen before include "Putting on ice" , "Delay" .)