Anatomy of a blackout

Students no longer have to wait — Little 500 week has finally arrived on campus. The week is well known for its races, numerous activities and concerts. However, there is another aspect of Little 500 that many students look forward to: the partying.

“Last year, I went to Lil Wayne’s concert, a few frat parties and a few house parties,” junior Shan Shaikh said. “It was pretty tight. It was an all-out rager for a week. There was drinking, dancing, girls and all sorts of fun stuff.”

But with the partying comes side effects, including blackouts.

Jackie Daniels, a social worker at the Office of Alternative Screening and Intervention Services in the IU Division of Student Affairs, defined a “blackout” as the loss of memory someone experiences during an episode of drinking.

“A person’s susceptibility to blacking out is increased if they drink too much too quickly or engage in ‘binge drinking,’” Daniels said. “This is defined as five or more drinks for a male in less than two hours and four for women.”

Peter Finn, a professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences and principal investigator in the Biobehavioral Alcohol Research Laboratory, described blackouts as “a block of time that you cannot recall during the period that you were drinking.”

“Alcohol affects the neurons in the hippocampus, which plays an important role in the consolidation of information from short-term memory to long-term memory,” Finn said. “In an easy-to-understand fashion, alcohol disrupts the hippocampus memory-encoding function to where it isn’t recording anymore. A person who experiences a blackout will never be able to remember what occurred during that time frame. When the hippocampus isn’t functioning, it isn’t recording.”

Daniels described why a person experiencing a blackout is still able to function.

“Basically, other functions controlled with the brain are not shut down completely,” Daniels said. “Alcohol is a central nervous system depressant, causing the slowing of or depression of key bodily functions necessary to keep you alive — breathing, heart rate and consciousness.”

People generally black out when they reach 0.20 blood alcohol content levels, Daniels said. Once a BAC level of 0.30 is reached, a person can pass out, and once a 0.40 BAC level is reached, a person can enter a coma.

However, a person’s body tries to protect itself in many ways before reaching that level of intoxication.

“Vomiting or running back and forth to the bathroom is an attempt to expel the poison you are feeding your body,” Daniels said. “Your body sends you signals at each BAC check point, and if you pay attention to these signals, you will know when to stop. However, this signaling system malfunctions if you drink more than one to two drinks per hour.”

There are two types of blackouts: en bloc and fragmentary.

“En bloc is when you cannot remember anything from a specific period of time,” Daniels said. “Fragmentary is more commonly called a brownout, when you can only remember snippets of an event or conversation. Fragmentary are more commonly experienced, but both are equally dangerous.”

After experiencing a blackout, Daniels said, most students she speaks to feel anxious and regretful.

Director of IU Counseling and Psychological Services Nancy Stockton shares a similar attitude.

“Students come in and talk about experiencing blackouts,” Stockton said. “They say that their friends tell them things that they can’t remember, and by and large, it’s usually disturbing to students. It’s kind of a wake-up call and maybe one of the things that brings them in to CAPS.”

Though drinking alcohol in excess is a major contributor to blackouts, there are other factors that come into play that might tip the scale toward actually experiencing a blackout, Finn said.

“How alcohol affects a person has to do with that individual,” Finn said. “Some people are more sensitive to the effects of alcohol, others less so. It has to do with tolerance.”

Oftentimes, the rate at which individuals consume their alcohol is the deciding factor of whether the person actually experiences a blackout, Finn said. When alcohol is consumed quickly, a person’s BAC quickly increases, as opposed to slow consumption, which allows the body to adapt to the presence of the alcohol.

“When a person goes from a BAC level of zero to 0.15, which is about six drinks for your average 140-pound person, in a short amount of time, they more or less shock the system,” Finn said. “That can trigger a blackout. If alcohol is consumed slowly, certain adaptive processes are engaged that are able to handle that amount of alcohol. Of course, once a person reaches a certain level, even if they have been drinking slowly, they can experience a blackout.”

Fatigue, hunger and stress are other factors that affect how fast the alcohol content in a person’s blood rises, Finn said, which in turn affects whether a person experiences a blackout.

Finn said the number of students who experience a blackout at IU is undoubtedly high.

“I do a lot of studies regarding people who have alcohol problems, including students at IU,” Finn said. “We have diagnostic interviews where we ask questions, like, ‘how often do you experience blackouts?’ As to how many actually experience blackouts, my general impression is that it is quite prevalent, at least in those who report heavy drinking. Higher than one might think.”

Last week, the IU Student Association established a Culture of Care week to
address the safety and social issues that are happening on campus and in the Bloomington community.

Former Chief of Staff Megan Lillie worked with other IUSA members to make students more aware of the dangers of alcohol abuse.

“The purpose of this week is to change the current culture and emphasize the need for all community members to step up and be Hoosiers,” Lillie said. “This means intervening in situations where students need help, specifically in situations related to sexual assault, mental health and drug and alcohol abuse.”

On Thursday as a part of Culture of Care week, IUSA focused on alcohol and drug usage.

“Thursday, we focused on the dangers of binge drinking and recognizing when it has taken a turn for the worst,” Lillie said. “Blacking out is the body’s last attempt at preserving life, and oftentimes this phrase is used in a humorous context to describe a night’s activities. The current culture at IU embraces this phrase, and it has led to many tragedies on campus.”

In 2002, researchers from the Department of Psychiatry at Duke University in North Carolina wrote an article titled “Prevalence and Correlates of Alcohol-Induced Blackouts Among College Students: Results of an E-Mail Survey,” which was featured in the Journal of American College Health.

After surveying 772 college students via email, the authors found that “approximately 51 percent of those who had ever consumed alcohol reported that they had experienced a blackout at some point in their lives.”

Other results of the survey showed that 40 percent of those surveyed had experienced a blackout the year before.

Among those who drank in the two weeks before the survey, nearly one in 10 reported having experienced a blackout, according to the article.

After working with students who have talked about experiencing blackouts, Stockton said students often regret having blacked out.

“People in general don’t like feeling out of control,” Stockton said. “They are made very uncomfortable by the fact that they may have behaved in ways they don’t remember.”

Daniels said she understands that alcohol is inevitably going to be a part of campus life and that she wants students to be safe.?

“My general impression is that students would not black out if they knew how not to do so,” Daniels said. “I’m invested in making sure students know as much as possible to make sure they are drinking safely, not just legally, but so they survive without harm.”

With Little 500 week already in full swing, students are attending concerts, events and other activities that are all part of the experience. To have a successful week, Shaikh said students just have to watch themselves.

“I can have a good time without overdoing it,” Shaikh said. “I’ve seen people whose weeks have had to end early, and that’s just not cool. All you have to do is watch yourself, and you will have an awesome Little Five week.”