College Students and Alcohol Abuse Statistics

• Data from several national surveys indicate that about four in five college students drink and that about half of college student drinkers engage in heavy episodic consumption.
  
  
• Young people ages 18 to 25 have the highest prevalence of binge (38.7 percent) and heavy (13.6 percent) drinking, with a peak rate (48.2 percent for binge and 17.8 percent or heavy drinking) occurring at age 21, according to the 2001 National Household Survey on Drug Abuse.
  
  
• Binge drinking, is typically defined as consuming five or more drinks in a row for men, and four or more drinks in a row for women.
  
  
• The U.S. Surgeon General and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services have identified binge drinking among college students as a major public health problem.
  
  
• The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism's Task Force on College Drinking reports that:
  
  -1,700 college students between the ages of 18 and 24 die each year from alcohol-related unintentional injuries, including motor vehicle crashes.
  -599,000 students between the ages of 18 and 24 are unintentionally injured under the influence of alcohol.
  -More than 696,000 students between the ages of 18 and 24 are assaulted by another student who has been drinking.
  -More than 97,000 students between the ages of 18 and 24 are victims of alcohol-related sexual assault or date rape.
  
  
• According to a recent study in the Archives of General Psychiatry, 18 percent of U.S. college students (24 percent of men, 13 percent of women) suffered from clinically significant alcohol-related problems, compared with 15 percent of their non-college attending peers (22 percent of men, 9 percent of women).
  
  
• The National Mental Health Association reports that one in three depressed persons suffer from some form of substance abuse or dependence.
  
  
• According to a 2004 survey by the American College Health Association, nearly half of all college students report feeling so depressed at some point in time that they have trouble functioning, and 14.9 percent meet the criteria for clinical depression.
  
  Of the 14.9 percent of students who reported having ever been diagnosed with depression:
  - 35.8 percent said they had been diagnosed with depression in the last school year.
  - 25.2 percent said they are currently in therapy for depression.
  - 38 percent said they are currently taking medication for depression.
  
  
Students reported during the last school year feeling the following:
- Over 60 percent reported feeling things were hopeless one or more times.
- Almost 40 percent of the men and 50 percent of the women reported feeling so depressed that they had difficulty functioning one or more times.
- 10 percent reported seriously considering attempting suicide at least one time.