Red Cup Diet: Pete Riley / PHOTO EDITOR
All over the United States, college students face several behavioral problems including eating disorders and alcohol or substance abuse. Imagine the effects of combining two such problems to make a sort of super-disorder.
One product of such a combination is a growing phenomenon socially nicknamed “drunkorexia.”
According to the report “Starving Themselves, Cocktail in Hand” by Sarah Kershaw of The New York Times, “drunkorexia” involves “self-imposed starvation or binging and purging, combined with alcohol abuse.”
Kershaw explains drunkorexics tend to be “college-age binge drinkers, typically women, who starve all day to offset the calories in the alcohol they consume.” Another phenomenon related to “drunkorexia” involves bulimia and alcohol abuse where the alcohol is used as a means for a bulimic to purge themselves of any food or liquid consumption.
Ann Marie DelSignore, a senior staff clinician in Auburn’s Student Counseling Services, made it clear that “drunkorexia” is not a term used by health care professionals and that there is no set criteria for assessing such a disorder.
She further explained that an individual could be diagnosed with an eating disorder and an alcohol or substance abuse problem separately and that the resulting combination would be found “potentially problematic” by a health care professional.
“We have seen some individuals that are struggling with managing problems associated with both an eating disorder and alcohol/substance abuse,” DelSignore said in reference to any occurrences of this at Auburn.
She advises students struggling with these types of issues “to seek the help of a medical and/or mental health care professional.”
As for possible risks of such medical issues as “drunkorexia,” DelSignore suggests “both chronically restricting food intake and consuming alcohol could increase the potential risk for an individual to develop a variety of health problems” as well as increasing the “potential implications for one’s ability to cope in multiple contexts (academics, work, relationships) of his/her life.”
Emily Walters, a freshman majoring in Nutrition and Dietetics, said she thinks the combination of such behavioral issues sounds like something that can become a serious problem among college students, especially girls who are more concerned about their weight.
Although eating disorders and the combination of the latter with alcohol abuse is typically observed in women, DelSignore states “both women and men seek counseling services to assist them in coping with concerns associated with eating disorders.”
Walters also comments that the most obvious problem with the combination is “the effects of alcohol would be more severe.”
Eating disorders as well as alcohol and substance abuse problems are dangerous individually to a person’s health. The risks of such issues are magnified by current phenomena of combining the two.
The action of refraining in order to consume is a growing trend and one that seems to be weighing heavily on populations of people where both self image and alcohol intake are prevalent.
College campuses across the United States fit this mold and may see the effects of such dangerous combinations of self-restraint and compulsion in the near future.
