Chapter Fifty-Five: Less Beer? (~jinghan)

 

As I was reading this article, it occured to me that even if you aren’t a “drinker” you feel the pressure to be able to talk about alcohol, or say “I know a friend who…” and heck I even catch myself being surprised when someone days “I don’t drink.” without gushing out some excuse. Lets face it: drinking culture is a little bit omnipresent.

Other than all those standard things you heard about: alcohol-related injuries, death by alcohol poisoning, damage to the brain and liver, adiction etc. etc. I was surprised to find increase in sexual abuse cases among the symptoms. And I’m not sure that’s as easy to laugh off as someone tripping over themselves.

The following exerpt referrs to “college” (ie. tertiarry education in Australia english) experience and the rise in mental illness. And is from A nation of Wimps: The High Cost of Invasive Parenting. Publisher: Crown Archetype, April 15 2008, ISBN-10: 0767924037, pages 151,

The nature of student drinking has changed dramatically in recent years. […] The drinking today is highly goal directed, and the new goal in drinking is exceedingly blunt: to drink as much as possible as quickly as possible. Binge drinking is defined as consuming more than five drinks (four drinks, for women) at one sitting. *

[…]

But why has binge drinking become such a serious problem only in the past decade? It has to do with the changing nature of social life, insists the psychologist Bernado Carducci, a professor at Indiana University Southeast, where he is founder and director of the Shyness Research Institue. Students, he finds, increasingly lack garden-variety social skills, the kind acquired over time in repeated face-tor-face encounters, first with adults and then with peers, the kind that breeds sensitivity to others, the understanding of often-subtle interpersonal cues, and the ability to resolve conflicts. Heavy drinking has become the quickest and easiest way to get accepted. “Much of college social activity is centered on alcohol comsumption becuse it’s an anxiety reducer and demands no social skills,” says Carducci.

“Plus, it provides an instant identity; it lets people know that you are willing to belong.” Whether it is your usual style of socialzing or not, “everyone binges the first few weeks of college,” reports a professional observer of student life who is not long out of college herself.

“You have the transition period**,” explains Carducci. “Anytime there is a period of transition, there is a period of uncertainty. And uncertainty leads to conformity; uncertainty makes us turn to others. When you’re turning to others, when you’re trying to affiliate, you turn to people who are most like you. And when you are uncertain, you are much more likely to be subject to social influence. People get you to do things so that you will feel like you fit in.”

[…]

Binge drinking appears to go far deeper than group validation and stress relief. The psychologist Paul Joffe of the counceling center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign believes that students engage in binge drinking as a misguided, but readily accessible way to put meaning in their lives. From extensive interviews he has conducted with students, he contends that binge drinking is, at bottom, a quest for authenticity and intensity of experience***. It gives young people something all their own to talk about, and sharing stories about the path to passing out is a primary purpose, a pathway to bonding.

*This surprised me actually. It’s worrying that this ‘seems’ like not much drinking relative to what people like to boast about

** You know, I thought it was just me and my grade-five self that struggled with the transition from one school to another. But I guess I was lucky that I learned to cope with this in an alcohol-free world and where I could tell myself “in two years you’ll be in another school so it doesn’t matter if you don’t fit in here.” In college/univeristy there’s no “other” school, just life, possibly lonely. I guess that makes me lucky.

*** “intensity of experience” I like this phrase and it feels true that this motivates many of my risk-taking actions. It takes a lot of courage to bond with people in a meaningful way.