Consequences
It’s important to note that you do not have to have an alcohol dependence to experience a blackout (either en bloc or fragmentary). Students in one study who reported blackouts were demographically similar to other drinking students. Importantly, however, students reporting blackouts drank more, and had other symptoms of alcoholic drinking, even though they did not fall into the alcoholic range on the MAST (Michigan Alcoholism Screen Test). Half of the students reported having had a blackout during their drinking careers, which closely followed other research findings.
In another study 25% of healthy college students reported being familiar with alcoholic blackouts. 51% of the students reported that they had had at least one blackout. Blackouts were reported during activities such as spending money (27%), sexual conduct (24%), fighting (16%), vandalism (16%), unprotected intercourse (6%), and driving a car (3%). So a significant number of students were engaged in a range of possibly hazardous activities during blackouts.
Of 545 individuals in another study, 161 (29.5%) reported driving drunk, 139 (25.5%) reported a regretted sexual situation, 67 (12.3%) reported unprotected sex, 60 (11%) reported having damaged property, 55 (10.1%) reported getting into a physical fight, and 29 (5.3%) reported injuring someone while under the influence of alcohol in the past 6 months.
Read more about this topic: Blackout (alcohol-related Amnesia)
Famous quotes containing the word consequences:
“[As teenager], the trauma of near-misses and almost- consequences usually brings us to our senses. We finally come down someplace between our parents’ safety advice, which underestimates our ability, and our own unreasonable disregard for safety, which is our childlike wish for invulnerability. Our definition of acceptable risk becomes a product of our own experience.”
—Roger Gould (20th century)
“The consequences of our actions grab us by the scruff of our necks, quite indifferent to our claim that we have “gotten better” in the meantime.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“The middle years are ones in which children increasingly face conflicts on their own,... One of the truths to be faced by parents during this period is that they cannot do the work of living and relating for their children. They can be sounding boards and they can probe with the children the consequences of alternative actions.”
—Dorothy H. Cohen (20th century)