Photo by John Sherman.
Thursday, April 7 was Think Outside the Bottle Day, presented by SGA, Student Counseling Services and the Office of Student Wellness & Alcohol/Drug Education (OSWADE). The three in conjunction offered “A campus wide [sic] celebration of healthy choices!” from 11:30 AM to 5 PM in the 1962 Room, during which time students were encouraged to fill out a survey about their drinking habits and then speak to a professional about their answers.
The alcohol survey is a single two-sided sheet of paper. The first side contains questions about social drinking habits—“To what extent do YOU want YOUR FRIENDS” to take certain responsible social actions: stepping in and doing something if: another person is drinking too much, someone is drinking to the point of hurting themselves [sic], someone’s intoxicated behaviors are embarrassing the group, or in order to seek medical assistance when I (presumably “they”) suspect someone has alcohol poisoning. The survey responder then ranks his or her interest in his or her friends performing each of these actions, on a scale from one to four (1-to a great extent, 2-somewhat, 3-very little, 4-not at all).
Full disclosure: when answering, I read the prompt as “To what extent do YOU and YOUR FRIENDS do the following,” which I find a more important question than what I want MY FRIENDS to do, since as the question stands it would seem to absolve me of the responsibility to do the things I think MY FRIENDS should be doing. Right?
The following section demands a bit more agency, asking the survey taker to rank on a scale of acceptability behaviors like missing class because of a hangover, blacking out, consuming 5 or more drinks in two hours and “talking to a friend about how their drinking habits are causing problems for that person.” Well I got ninety-nine problems, but a Scotch ain’t one.
I’m kidding. I don’t drink Scotch. What I do drink is beer, wine, tequila and appletinis (again, kidding). The second side of the survey got down to details with regard to what I’ve come to call “my problem.”
How often do you have a drink containing alcohol? This question is really hard. I don’t know the answer. Kind of often? I answered “4 days a week” just to cover my bases, figuring Tuesday bar night and one or two nights out of the weekend, and then at least once somewhere in a glass of wine or two with Jeopardy!. What is “big deal”?
How many drinks containing alcohol do you have on a typical day when you are drinking? Like “often,” “typical” is difficult to define. Selecting a number between zero and twelve to represent two nights of two drinks and three nights of six drinks is fraught with bargaining and bound for inaccuracy. The law of averages says (2 + 2 + 6 + 6) / 4 = 4. Rarely do I have four drinks; that’s too drunk for Jeopardy! and not drunk enough for Cro. So what the hell does “4” say about my drinking habits?
The answers on the second side correspond to a tally sheet, which assigns a weighted number score to each one. These tallies are then totaled and checked against a key, which determines the existence and/or seriousness of the survey taker’s drinking problem.
I scored a twelve, whatever that means, and it was explained to me by the professional I spoke to that “Eight is the cutoff for what we consider to be…problem drinking.” In trying to locate a key with descriptions of each level, both above and below “eight,” I took an online version of the same screening (available at www.mentalhealthscreening.org/screening/CONNCOLL), which elaborated on my drinking habits more pointedly, reporting, “Your screening results are consistent with symptoms of hazardous or harmful alcohol use.” Frankly, so is college.
My professional advised me to consider cutting back on my drinking, but did not recommend follow-up counseling.
In all fairness, SGA, Student Counseling Services and the OSWADE (or perhaps SGASCSOSWADE) should be commended for their efforts to make students more aware of their drinking habits. Awareness is the first step on the way to health, and while the latter may be a pipe dream as a college student, the former is nothing to sneeze at.
At the same time, college-sponsored Think Outside the Bottle Day took place just a week after Fifty Days and two weeks before Changing of the Guard, both college-sponsored events featuring copious free alcohol. The irony is palpable. Are we inside the bottle or outside it? Need we merely think outside the bottle, even as we grind and slosh deep, deep inside it? What a relief that would be.
At the very least, Think Outside the Bottle Day has me counting drinks—how many Seabreezes can I make with 750mL of vodka?
Forgive my cheekiness. I haven’t had a drink all day. •
“Frankly, so is college.”
No.