Reviving Ophelia - Mary Bray Pipher [101]
Research on adolescents shows three basic motives for chemical use. The first is for expanded awareness, or the desire to increase sensitivity and insight. The second is for thrill seeking and new experiences with peers; and the third is for the drug effect—that is, to get high. All of these reasons have in common the desire to achieve an altered state of consciousness. Of course, thrill seeking can be dangerous. Using chemicals for effect can also lead to dependency.
Chemical use as a coping strategy is tremendously appealing to teenage girls, who are often confused, depressed and anxious. Alcohol and marijuana are popular because they offer teenage girls a quick, foolproof way to feel good. Caffeine and amphetamines help girls avoid hunger and eat less. (Losing weight is probably the most common goal of girls this age.) Plus, chemical use often enhances status with friends.
How do we know when alcohol or drug use is a problem? Heredity cannot be overemphasized. Thirty percent of the children of alcoholic parents become alcoholic. Girls from families with serious problems are certainly more at risk than girls who come from healthier families. But I don’t want to overstate this. Teenage girls from well-adjusted families sometimes develop serious problems with chemicals. Peers play a role. In general, kids whose friends are heavy users are more likely to use, while kids whose friends abstain are more likely to abstain.
Certain patterns, such as drinking to escape reality or drinking to get wasted, are more dangerous than others. I worry about girls who drink more than their friends or who drink regularly. Drinking alone or being secretive about drugs and alcohol are bad patterns. But each case must be evaluated separately. Often drug and alcohol use are symptoms of other problems.
Particularly with teenage girls, it’s important to try to understand the context in which chemical use occurs. So much is happening at this time. Often heavy chemical use is a red flag that points to other issues, such as despair, social anxiety, problems with friends or family, pressure to achieve, negative sexual experiences or difficulty finding a positive identity. The stories in this chapter attempt to show how chemical use is tangled up with all other aspects of adolescent girls’ experiences. The girls use alcohol or drugs for different reasons, and the response to their use must be tailored to each unique situation.
RITA (16)
Rita looked as if she’d stepped out of an MTV video. Her brown hair was decorated with feathers and beads, and she was dressed in a skin-tight satiny dress. But Rita’s personality didn’t match her flamboyant clothing. She was soft-spoken, almost shy, and eager to be liked. In a tentative way, she told me that she had just been arrested for drunken driving. This embarrassed and scared her. Her dad was an alcoholic and the last thing she wanted was to follow in his footsteps.
Rita said, “I’m here because I want to get fixed while I’m young. I don’t want to live a screwed-up life like my parents.”
Rita was the oldest of three children. Her dad was a salesman at a discount furniture store and her mother was a homemaker. Things had been bad for as long as Rita could remember. Her mother had arthritis and couldn’t work. Her dad was a womanizer and a compulsive gambler who worked long hours, then hit the bars or keno parlors. He wasn’t around home often, but when he was it was chaos and misery.
“I was hit a lot myself.” She showed me a scar above her left eye where she’d been hit by a beer bottle. “But that wasn’t the worst of it. Dad said horrible things when he was drunk, like ‘You’ll never get a man, you’re too ugly,’ or ‘too big of a bitch,’ or ‘too much of a slut.’ ”
She shuddered. “I stayed out of Dad’s way. I lay awake and listened to him yell at Mom. Sometimes he hit her.”
She pushed her long hair back from her face. “When I was fourteen I told Dad that if he ever touched Mom again I would