College Binge Drinking: A Precursor of Alcohol Abuse

Can a person’s drinking habits from their college years and younger really be an indicator of how they will react to adult beverages later in life? Researchers say there is a correlation.

A recent article sheds light on a debate with psychiatrists on the verbiage that they use to describe alcohol abuse in young adults, specifically those in college. They say that by coining their behavior as a disorder, a large percentage of students could be wrongly diagnosed and their drinking habits may change the older they get.

Medical professionals say there is a relationship between the age when a person starts drinking and alcoholism later in life. The younger the drinker the more apt they are to abuse alcohol at some point in their life.

Drinking underage often happens when a person goes to college. Those who drink in college often are binge drinkers and other things happen when they use alcohol in excess and in a short amount of time as defined by the term binge drinking.

Driving under the influence, sexual assaults, suicide and negligence of their school work are just a few of the issues that can be associated with young adults who turn to the bottle at an early age.

However, there are still those people who may have over indulged when they were young and by the time they reach their twenties, their dependence on alcohol has dropped dramatically.

To diagnose every student who has ever binge drank in college as having a disorder could be a bit premature. While according to the research, there may be red flags that a person who starts drinking young could have a life time dependence on alcohol; this is not necessarily the norm.

So if every student who drank excessively in college was determined as suffering from an alcohol abuse disorder, treatment centers would be overflowing with youngsters. This determination must be used on a case by case basis and not an all or none approach.