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"Another wave of nausea hit hard as the emergency room nurse hooked me up to an IV. My parents stood wearily at the foot of my hospital bed, fearful and worried. \"She's the ninth one today,\" I heard the nurse whisper to the doctor when he arrived. There are three college dormitories within a mile of that New York City hospital, and the nine of us who had landed in the ER that day were there because of one thing: excessive drinking.\n\nWhen this happened to me five years ago, I didn't see myself as having an alcohol problem. Getting drunk, being sick, and passing out on weekends didn't seem totally out of the ordinary for an outgoing college kid like myself. But what had started out as simply drinking at parties since sophomore year of high school eventually led to alcoholism\u2014and many other teens today are at risk of falling down this slippery slope too. Just ask Jessica*, from New York. She first tried vodka at age twelve while hanging out with pals, and the next day her friend called her and told her how funny she was drunk and how confident she'd been. That's all the encouragement Jessica needed to start drinking every time she went out. \"If I was at a party and they ran out of alcohol, I always finagled other people into giving me theirs or finding me more,\" remembers Jessica, now 20. \"I'd be on the verge of panic without it, and I drank whatever I could get my hands on.\"\n\nLimiting alcohol consumption to parties instead of drinking on a daily basis may seem reasonable, but the truth is that many teens binge drink\u2014which is loosely defined as having four or more alcoholic beverages in one sitting for females\u2014in social settings, and this dangerous behavior is becoming increasingly common. According to a report from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, hospitalizations among eighteen- to 24-year-olds due to alcohol overdoses have shot up by roughly 25 percent over the past decade. It's affecting younger teens as well, warns Scott Bienenfeld, M.D., medical director of the New York Center for Living. \"Binge drinking used to be mainly a problem found on college campuses and in fraternities or sororities, but it's on the rise among young adolescent girls and places them at greater risk of physical and emotional problems,\" he explains.\n\nIn addition, a disturbing trend dubbed \"drunkorexia\" has emerged in which girls are restricting their calories during the day by eating less and then saving those calories for booze-fueled nights. Researchers at the University of Missouri found that this unhealthy behavior is almost three times more common among girls than guys, and the reasons young people do it include preventing weight gain and getting trashed more quickly.\n\nMolly*, an ambitious A-student from California, admits that these two factors motivated her to go down that harmful road. \"I developed anorexia in eighth grade, and soon afterward I realized I could get drunk faster if I didn't eat\u2014and then if I threw up at the end of the night, that was even better,\" shares the now-22-year-old. \"I didn't think it was abnormal, because all the girls around me were doing the exact same thing.\" Starving yourself and saturating your bloodstream with alcohol comes at a steep price, experts warn: It boosts your chances of experiencing memory loss, physical injury, and sexual assault. Plus, alcohol affects girls more severely than it does guys, reminds Bienenfeld, saying, \"Girls have less of the enzyme required to break down alcohol than boys do, so they become intoxicated more quickly with less alcohol and remain intoxicated longer.\"\n\nConsidering these scary risks, why are so many intelligent girls still getting wasted on the weekends? According to Jennifer Hartstein, Psy.D., an adolescent psychologist in New York City, alcohol provides a false sense of confidence for many teens, who use it to feel more popular in social situations. \"Finding true friendships is difficult in adolescence, and drinking becomes a way to connect to other people,\" she says. Enter the common ritual of \"pregaming,\" which involves drinking before going to a party in order to calm your nerves. However, the more you drink, the more you inhibit your ability to create feelings of well-being and confidence on your own, warns Hartstein. Eventually, teens may find that they can't walk into a party or talk to someone they like without having alcohol in their system. \"Also, knowing how to say no is a challenge if a girl is afraid that her friends may choose not to hang out if she doesn't do as they do,\" adds Hartstein.\n\nOther teens booze it up on the weekends because it seems like a quick and easy stress reliever. \"The idea of not having drinks after a rough week, exams, or during a celebration used to make me nervous,\" confesses Molly. \"You don't have to drink every day to be an alcoholic. But you want it, you crave it.\" Depression may also play a role. \"Not everyone has a clinically diagnosable mental illness, but even slight feelings of depression and anxiety can lead someone to pick up a drink,\" says Hartstein. \"The key is not to use alcohol as a source of emotion management.\"\n\nLooking back, Jessica acknowledges that depression was a big contributor toward the latter half of her heavy drinking period, and she was using alcohol to self-medicate. \"I'd go on websites drunk and alone and fill out these questionnaires about depression. It turned out I was severely depressed, but all I knew was that the thoughts of suicide I had when I was sober would be phased out when I was drinking,\" she says. She would promise her parents she'd never drink again but would be back at it within a week. \"Whenever I made a decision to stop, my friends constantly tried to talk me out of it by saying things like 'You're young, you're not an alcoholic. You're just being dramatic!' And I agreed with them.\" By then, Jessica had gained a reputation at school for always getting wrecked at parties and being the one who needed to be taken care of. \"My yearbook was only signed with messages like 'Oh my god, so crazy,' 'So wild,' and 'Love drinking with you and seeing you at parties' surrounded by sketches of beer bottles. Not one person said anything nice about me,\" she says.\n\nIt can be difficult to know when social drinking has become a more serious problem, but Bienenfeld suggests asking the following questions: Have your friends expressed concern about your drinking? When you go to a party, do you obsessively worry that there won't be any alcohol there? Do you find it hard to stop drinking once you start? \"If the answer is yes to any of these questions, you should really think about getting help,\" he says. \"Approach a school counselor or ask your parents to help you get in touch with an addiction specialist.\" Molly finally realized her drinking had turned into an addiction when she went to Costa Rica as a volunteer with a program during her freshman year of college and she was told she wasn't allowed to drink. \"I was so resentful, thinking, Who the hell are they to say I can't drink? But nobody else seemed to be bothered by it. The other girls were like, 'What's the big deal about not drinking?' \"\n\nThe best solution, of course, is not to let alcohol negatively impact your life in the first place. If you are a habitual social drinker, making the decision to stop can be terrifying\u2014after all, how do you not pick up a drink when other people are doing it? Try switching up your routine by finding social activities to enjoy with friends that don't involve alcohol.\n\nIn party situations, where the pressure to drink may be strong, Hartstein suggests that you simply pretend: Fill a glass with seltzer and a lime so it looks like a drink. Sometimes, acting silly or seemingly intoxicated will keep others from giving you more alcohol. Hartstein also recommends going with a friend who doesn't want to drink either, looking out for each other during the night, and then leaving together.\n\nI had done all sorts of things to try to control my own drinking: I told myself, I'll stop for a month, or I'll have just one or two drinks. I'll switch from hard liquor to wine. I'll only drink at dinner. These tactics worked for a short while, but I always fell right back off the wagon. Then one morning last fall, after a series of binges, I finally decided to enter an alcohol support group. Both Molly and Jessica also ended up joining a recovery program, and thankfully, all of us are now living alcohol-free. \"Three years ago I was miserable, but now I can deal with life,\" says Jessica. \"I'm still a social butterfly, but I don't need a drink to be that person.\"\n\nMolly admits that every once in a while she still feels awkward in new social situations, but she no longer depends on alcohol to get her through it. \"The first time I went out to a friend's twenty-first birthday, I took some other sober pals with me and had the time of my life,\" she says. \"When you remove the alcohol, real relationships start to form. The friends I have now are irreplaceable.\"\n\n*Names have been changed."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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