Sign up for alerts

Winter 2008/09 | Vol 12 No 2

Downloaded

Sheila Lacroix

Youth and Alcohol

Binge drinking: Extent of the problem

Binge drinking by teens and young adults is a concern. To find out the extent of the problem in your region, visit the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse web site (www.ccsa.ca), which offers various reports on its Statistics pages. Select “Statistics” from the main menu and follow links to student surveys from across Canada.

The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (www.niaaa.nih.gov) has two resources about young people’s drinking. See Alcohol Alert no. 59 – Underage Drinking: A Major Public Health Challenge, for a referenced research summary that covers key issues. Also see the NIAAA journal, Alcohol Research and Health, vol. 28:4, 2004/05, Focus on Young Adult Drinking. Some articles focus on risks and other factors in the adolescent years. The article “Alcohol and the Adolescent Brain” covers a topic that is difficult to research.

The Centre for Addiction Research of British Columbia (www.carbc.ca) offers the Alcohol Reality Check, an online resource for screening, raising awareness and intervening in risky drinking. The Youth Package includes low-risk drinking recommendations for youth; the 7-question Risky Drinking Checkup, scoring aid and screening guide and a take-home results form, which summarizes the checkup results and offers recommendations and local resources. To locate, use the search engine on the CARBC site.

The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (www.camh.net) provides full access to First Contact: Brief Treatment for Young Substance Users, which is a component of the larger package, Youth Drugs and Mental Health. This resource provides a brief, first-step intervention for youth, aged 14–25, who misuse alcohol and/or other drugs. It provides motivational interviewing and cognitive-behavioural and harm reduction approaches. The resource was developed for group settings but can be used in individual counselling.