Substance Abuse at College

In the college setting where large groups of people are forging their way into relationships and trying to prove themselves to a bunch of strangers, some believe that alcohol and drugs offer an easy way to socialize and have fun, while at the same time masking personal fears and uncertainties. Unfortunately, as Glenn found out, this coping mechanism easily leads to abuse and addiction:

Glenn has been there and back, and today is grateful to be alive. Glenn entered an East Coast university as a good student who liked to have a good time. "I drank a lot on weekends in high school," he remembers, "but I never thought it was a problem or that it would play a big part in my life"but it didn't turn out that way."

Glenn says that he started his mental meltdown during his first freshman semester. He began drinking more frequently as he pined away for a young woman he had met on campus. "I had never had a close relationship with someone of the opposite sex before,"he admits. "I had always been nervous around girls and found that if  I drank a lot at parties, then I didn't really care about picking up girls." Soon Glenn found himself avoiding parities and drinking alone in his room. "People at parties didn't drink the way I wanted to drink; they would drink and socialize and dance. I just wanted to get drunk. I was much happier doing that by myself."

Eventually, Glenn and Sheila, the girl he had fallen for, became a couple. But the drinking didn't end. It ­ wasn't long before Glenn began inventing problems to worry about. He was convinced that Sheila was cheating on him and was laughing at him, so he drank even more to deaden his insecurities.

At the start of his sophomore year, Glenn knew he was in trouble. "I was on academic probation, I was still drinking every day, and I was miserable. But I knew I had run out of reasons for drinking. I had my girlfriend; I was majoring in history, which I really liked, and I had plenty of money from my parents. There was nothing really wrong, but I felt terrible. What I needed was psychiatric attention."

Glenn went to the college's counseling service and then moved on to private therapists in the area. Each one advised him to check in at a treatment program for his drinking problem. But he didn't buy into that solution at all and found himself at an impasse with every therapist he went to. "None of them came even close  to refusing me care until I got clean, a stance I firmly believe in today," Glenn says. So although he was willing to talk about his problems, this was not helping his drinking problem.

Glenn's parents were aware of his drinking and were willing to pay for whatever help he needed, but that ­ wasn't enough. "I'm an only child, and I had a good home environment, but my parents really didn't understand how desperate I was. My father told me that he had gone through a period of depression when he was in college and that he drank a lot back then too. So my parents thought I was just going through the same thing."

But Glenn's situation was not "just a phase." As his drinking continued, he stopped going to classes completely. He would lock himself in his room and fly into angry rages, smashing furniture and punching the walls"hard enough to break both hands on separate occasions. When the rages subsided, Glenn would distract himself from his pain by planning his death. "I ended every day thinking about how to kill myself and end it all."

Toward the end of his sophomore year, it was Glenn's room­ mate who finally blew the whistle to alert Glenn's parents. "My roommate came in one night around dinnertime and found me on the floor with the chair on top of me," remembers Glenn. "At first, he couldn't wake me up, and then when I did come to, I didn't even recognize him and walked out saying I was going to a bar. He must have been pretty scared to take the drastic step of calling my parents. The next morning when I woke up, my mother was sitting in a chair at my bedside. She tried to get me to eat and get organized. She helped me map out the things I needed to do to get back on track. We did talk about getting professional help, but finally I just asked her to leave and said I didn't want to see her anymore. I know my mom was miserable while I was miserable, but she didn't know what to do for me either."

Although Glenn's mother couldn't help him, he says that her presence and her concern convinced him that he could no longer pretend to be just fine. Two days later, Glenn withdrew from college and checked himself into an inpatient detox/rehab center for alcoholism for forty days. "Although it took a while to convince me," says Glenn, "accepting that I was an alcoholic was an unbelievable relief. Finally, there was a solution to this awful pain I had been living with. The people I met in the detox center were just like me. They too had felt hopeless, and now they were enjoying life and staying sober. I wanted to do that too." Glenn spent the following year living at home with his parents, driving a taxi to make some money, and joining Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) to keep himself on track. A year later, Glenn returned to the same university a changed man.

"I'd like to emphasize," says Glenn, "that I never thought in a million years that I would belong to AA, yet now I know it is the only reason I got through, as well as the only reason that I am still sober. I hope that anyone who is in a situation like I was and thinking there is no way out might check out an AA meeting and give it a try. For me, it was a literal life saver."

I hear many stories like Glenn's that illustrate my belief that kids aren't drinking to excess on college campuses only to "party." Many abuse alcohol and drugs because they feel vulnerable and unsure of themselves, and this numbs their pain.