Without alcohol, new initiative

There is at least one community on campus that will welcome anyone who wants to join it, yet, in a way, is extremely selective.

“I know that my situation is pretty rare, but there are other people who went through very similar situations,” Carl ’12 said. “[They] might not know that this group exists.”

Carl is a recovering alcoholic. Like his friends in the Recovery@ group — whose student, staff and faculty membership can be counted on two hands — Carl has made getting and staying sober his first priority.

“If I’m not sober, then there is no way I’d be able to even think about succeeding academically here,” he explained.

Carl’s name, as well as those of other students interviewed for this article, has been changed to protect his anonymity.

Carl took four “tumultuous” years off during his undergraduate career, the first two spent drinking and resisting help and the last two spent in recovery. He reapplied to the University and moved back to school this past fall. With one year left at Princeton, he said his motivations for being here could not be more different than they were when he first arrived in 2004.

“[I want to] graduate, hopefully,” he said. “And try and have some fun, but actually be here, take advantage of my time here. While I was here before ... It was sort of purposeless.”

Members of the group join by emailing recovery@princeton.edu, which is run by a member of the group who also works at University Health Services. This member forwards this email to others who can offer support.

Members explained that monthly dinner meetings of Recovery@ have helped foster a tight-knit community, and an ongoing discussion about how to make life at the University easier for recovering alcoholics.

The first day of the rest of their lives

The students interviewed for this article experienced a number of different paths to sobriety. Summer ’13 had her last drink on June 2, 2008.

“Someone I was dating at the time died,” she explained. “His car crashed on the freeway on June 1, and I got wasted the next day and then I ... didn’t ever again. I showed up in my therapist’s office drunk and she was like, ‘You need to go to [Alcoholics Anonymous], sweetie.’”

“And so I did,” she explained. “To get people off my back, not because I actually intended to take it seriously. I thought all people in AA were old white men sitting around singing kumbaya together ... And that they were all Jesus freaks.”

Lawrence, a graduate student, had received a citation for driving under the influence while he was an undergraduate and decided to go to an AA meeting because he thought it would help his defense for a case relating to his second alcohol-related driving arrest.

“About six months before I hit bottom, I had a great job, I was wildly in love with this girl, I thought I had figured the universe out,” he said. “And I was actually miserable. The only tool I had at my disposal at that point was to turn the volume up.”

Lawrence and the other students often had to listen to the stories of other alcoholics for them to recognize that they had a problem as well. Soon, they started going to AA meetings regularly because they wanted to.

“These people kept talking about things in a way that made sense in a way that almost nothing ever had,” Lawrence noted. “As an empirical question it was just really hard to argue with.”

Summer described a similar sentiment. “I had a lot to learn about,” she said. “Not just about myself, but how to deal with things by not drinking ... to actually deal with things the way normal people do is something that I had never learned [and] one of the many things that AA has really taught me.”

For Frank ’11, Walter ’11 and Carl, intervention through parents and health professionals was central to recovery, as was spending time at a rehabilitation center.

“I think it was my mom who talked to some dean and told them that I had this problem, because it was really obvious to her and not to them,” Walter said. His mother arranged for him to take a medical leave of absence.

“I didn’t want to go, but I felt the medical leave was a good idea because it would fix all these problems that I had created,” said Walter. “It was self-preservation, for the wrong reasons.”

Carl’s parents staged an intervention while he was living with them for a time during a voluntary leave. But “it didn’t work,” he said.

That day, the police arrested him for driving with a suspended license and no car insurance. After a friend bailed him out he spent six days drinking — what he described as his “last hurrah.”

He then got picked up again, this time for a DUI, and had to spend the night in a police station holding cell. 

At that point Carl thought, “I guess it’s time for me to go to rehab.” His parents placed him in a 30-day program in Arizona, and he later traveled to California to spend three months in an aftercare program.

Frank was struggling through what was already his second junior spring. He lived on a steady diet of sleeping pills, prescription painkillers and handles of alcohol, reaching a point where “every day I wake up, I’m mad that I’m alive,” he said.

Frank’s turning point came with an arrest, a turnover to Public Safety and mandatory counseling at UHS. Frank was belligerent. Though he had previously lied to UHS counselors and physicians about his substance abuse, this time Frank told them all of the drugs he was taking and the amounts he was drinking.

“You can try to help me, but it’s pointless,” he told them. The UHS physician picked up the phone and booked him a room at Princeton House Behavioral Health.

Frank’s first reaction was, “Fuck no, I’ve got an orgo test to fail.” But the next thing he knew he was in a Public Safety car on his way to the rehabilitation center. “I didn’t even pack a bag or anything,” he said.

After the officer left him at the care center, Frank apologized to the specialists at Princeton House for the trouble and said he would leave. “If you try to leave, we’re going to have you committed,” he remembers someone saying.

“She was justified,” Frank said. “That’s how insane I was.”

How the problem developed

For several of the students, making the transition from high school to college marked a dramatic shift in their consumption habits.

“It was not a part of my life [before], really. And I had really strict parents,” said Summer, who said she remembers drinking only “a handful of times” in high school.

“But the thing is, when I got to Princeton it was basically an instantaneous change,” she added. “Like, I was, the first day back from [Outdoor Action], completely wasted, puking in a toilet, don’t remember what happened. And it was every single day after that, with very few exceptions.”

Walter began using alcohol and drugs regularly in high school. Although his usage steadily increased during those four years, he maintained his academic performance in part because of the structure provided by his family and school.

“People were really on top of me,” he said. “You’re much more accountable when you’re in high school, especially at the high school I went to.”

In senior year, when he smoked marijuana every day and returned home from weeknight parties at 6 a.m., “it was crazy but it wasn’t crazy at the point where I stopped fulfilling the specific responsibilities I had,” he said. “I was still able to do well on tests and that sort of thing.”

He said that, because he kept producing good grades and captained a varsity team, he could rationalize his behavior at the time. “My drinking wasn’t really an issue because I could point to all these external things and say, ‘My life is great, my life is stable.’ And that really kept me from identifying the problem,” he explained.

For both Summer and Walter, however, their problems began to intensify during freshman year.

“It really did dictate my life,” Summer said of her alcohol use. “At the beginning, I felt really guilty about drinking all the time. I felt like I was ruining a part of my life. But at the same time, because I felt so guilty, I drank more, to sort of ... make it go away.”

For Walter, starting at the University was an opportunity to “finally get away from the grasp of my family and from the grasp of a school that really cared about me, to sort of [do] whatever I wanted to do.”

“I would just start drinking and using drugs every day, during the day, because I just felt like it,” he said.

Though Summer said the University’s “huge culture of free alcohol” meant that “the Street made it really easy for me to get wasted,” she noted that “it’s never been a possibility for me to just drink a couple drinks.”

“I was always thinking about drinking, even when I wasn’t or wasn’t able to,” she added. She also began taking cocaine and amphetamines, she said.

For Walter, the problem was independent of partying. He did not go to the Street or to fraternity parties often, he said. Rather, “the real problem [with] drinking and using occurred by myself: with me alone, or with some friends of mine who used and drank like I did.”

Both students said their everyday behavior began to change. Walter was on a varsity team when he first enrolled. “My drinking and using interfered with that so I quit that,” he said. “There were classes that I was taking that were challenging and doing work for them interfered with my drinking, so I either didn’t do the work or dropped the class or took the class P/D/F.”

Summer began to suffer from what would later be diagnosed as a mood disorder. She would go weeks feeling “wound up all the time,” she said.

“I’d never remember what I did, and I would think that was even cooler because I’d ask people about it,” she explained.

Other times, she said, she was paralyzed by severe depression. “The only thing that could get me out of bed was drinking, the thought of drinking,” she said.

The University’s role

Before recovery, students have varying levels of interaction with University officials or UHS personnel.

Often, students are referred to Counseling and Psychological Services by the dean or the director of student life of their residential college. This recommendation could be motivated by troubling academic performance or if the student received emergency care.

Summer said she was referred to Corner House on Witherspoon Street for counseling after she scored eight out of 10 on an alcoholism checklist that UHS administers after a student has received emergency alcohol-related treatment at University Medical Center at Princeton. Scoring three out of 10 indicates alcoholic behaviors.

“[Corner House is] where they refer all their bad cases,” she said. “They basically mandated that I go there once a week, but they didn’t really follow up on that very well. So I sort of went, and then stopped going.”

Summer said that the University’s ability to help an addict that doesn’t want help is limited. “Nothing was changing because I didn’t want it to,” she said. She wasn’t failing her classes, and, because of UHS privacy policies, her parents only knew what she was telling them. 

“At the end of the day all they can do is lock you up if they really want you to stop, or you just have to let it run its course,” she said.

“We believe it is important to understand alcohol use in the context of the individual’s life as a whole,” UHS Director of Counseling and Psychological Services Anita McLean said in an email to The Daily Princetonian. She noted that the number of students who come to CPS for alcohol issues is difficult to estimate because they often seek help for multiple or interrelated problems.

CPS team members provide assessments, short-term individual counseling, group therapy and psycho-education, she added. They also refer students to private therapists and treatment programs. 

Summer said she still has “great respect” for CPS and regularly sees a psychiatrist there for issues unrelated to recovery.

“It’s not like I think CPS doesn’t do its job, it’s just that I wasn’t willing to allow them to do their job,” she explained.

Walter, on the other hand, said his solitary drinking style and his success in lying to the University officials who questioned him meant that his dangerous behavior went unnoticed.

“I wouldn’t go out and, you know, break things and get into fights and that sort of thing. So I really kind of flew under the radar, and there really wasn’t any sort of outreach or support system,” he said, noting that he knew he could have gone to CPS at the time but didn’t want to or think he needed to.

“UHS does not provide mandated alcohol counseling,” McLean explained. She noted that, occasionally, students who come in voluntarily for help have been recommended to do so by concerned University personnel, including deans, faculty, staff, athletic coaches and residential college advisers.

However, Walter said he did have contact with administrators worried about his declining academic performance. “I had [deans] contact me through Butler College, and say, ‘What’s the problem here? We think you have a time management problem.’ And I would say, ‘Yeah, I have a time management problem, that’s what it is.’”  

“On multiple occasions I would just lie straight out,” he said. “I told [a dean] that I couldn’t go to my classes because I had this delayed sleep cycle syndrome, and I went so far as to look it up online and find out what the actual symptoms were.”

For each student, returning to the University required a different amount of communication with college and UHS staff.

Because his leave was a medical one, Walter had to write a letter explaining what he had done during his two years off. He also had to have been sober for at least six months and to have regular appointments with a licensed clinical social worker at CPS, he said. 

However, because both leaves of absence that Summer took were voluntary withdrawals, the readmission process was a “casual” one, she said.

Since there were no stipulations on her withdrawal that she needed to address, she was not required to meet with anybody upon her return to the University, she explained.

Lesley Nye, the Director of Student Life for Forbes College, said that she seeks to help returning students on a case-by-case basis.

“If a student has taken a voluntary leave, and alcohol (or drug) abuse is part of the reason, I will meet with them upon their return to check in, and make sure they are aware of the available resources,” she said in an email.

She added that such students typically “worry about balancing their academic and social lives, as well as maintaining their sobriety, despite our rather alcohol-infused campus culture.”

Meanwhile, Frank said he owes his life to physicians and therapists at CPS.

Not only did they send him to rehab, he said, but they also let him sleep in the infirmary for two weeks after his return.

“I didn’t feel safe in my room,” he said.

A Public Safety officer accompanied him on his return to flush all of his drugs and get rid of the alcohol.

Staying sober

The students interviewed for this article emphasized that the community provided by AA meetings and other students in recovery formed the cornerstone of their commitment to living with alcoholism and served as the best protection against relapse.

“It’s really important, having other like-minded people,” Carl said. “It’s crucial.”

“Our group pales in comparison [to AA meetings] in terms of numbers, but it’s great to have this resource of other Princeton community members,” Summer said about Recovery@. “We know how to reach out to each other frequently, and we can stop by the staff members’ offices if we need to and talk.”

“It’s really good to know that they’re there,” she added.

Still, the group is small and relatively self-driven. Some recovering students said they feel that there is more the University could do to support the community. Specifically, they would like to see greater flexibility within the housing policy.

The most important thing for people in recovery, Walter said, “is to have other people who are in recovery within reach.” If someone feels unstable or wants to drink, “it’s another person in recovery who can understand them the best and help them the best,” he added.

Currently, two of the undergraduates in Recovery@ live off-campus. As a sophomore, Summer requested an exception to live off-campus last fall and was denied. She currently lives in a residential college. Of the current juniors and seniors who live on campus, all of them live in residential colleges. Some said they plan to live in upperclass housing next year.

This spring, members of Recovery@ met with the Housing office and representatives of the Office of the Dean of Undergraduate Students to discuss the possibility of “recovery housing.”

“We did meet with the administration, with the housing office and with somebody from ODUS, and we were denied,” Carl said.

University spokeswoman Emily Aronson said that no final decision has been made on the topic. “The conversation among the students, ODUS and Housing will continue, so at this point it would be too early to answer specific questions or say what those conversations may lead to,” she said.

Walter indicated his hopes that any discussion would move forward quickly. “You might save someone’s life if you do this,” he said.

Lisa Laitman, director of Recovery Housing and Alcohol & Other Drug Assistance Program for students at Rutgers University, said that her program had made progress with its students.

“It’s a pretty parallel universe with a lot of support,” Laitman said. “There’s a lot less of that feeling that they’re missing out on something.”

At Rutgers, there is currently a house with room for 25 students in recovery, and Laitman said they plan to expand to provide housing for 13 more, due to high demand.

According to Laitman, 13 college campuses nationwide support recovery housing programs. To her knowledge, Rutgers was the first university to offer one, starting in 1988.

While “special-needs housing does not designate dorm buildings for one particular group of students,” Aronson noted, the University offers housing that is designated “substance-free.” Students living in these areas sign a contract agreeing to refrain from using alcohol or drugs in the building.

Aronson indicated that there might not be enough students on campus who would take advantage of recovery housing to justify its creation. “It would be difficult to designate a dorm for one specific group of students if there are not enough students interested to fill the rooms,” she said. “This also would limit other students’ housing options.”

Laitman acknowledged that Rutger’s size played a part in the success of the program. However, she emphasized that, because of the strength of the recovery housing option at Rutgers, more students have made it their destination college. “A lot of the students we hear from are high school seniors coming to college already in recovery,” she said. 

Laitman added that it had become a haven for recently sober transfer students. “There is no way that they can go back to a college where they have all this trouble,” she said. 

Summer said that the substance-free housing currently offered by the University is “not a proper substitute.” 

While students in substance-free housing are required to refrain from substance use in their rooms, their motivations for signing the pledge could not differ more from those of an alcoholic who wants to stay sober, Summer explained.

“Substance-free is, we feel, totally different from recovery housing,” Summer said. She said she did not request substance-free housing this year because she did not “see the point.”

“It’s this extreme disparity between people who would be drinking anyway or people who really don’t get drinking. And then there’s us,” Summer said. “We’re closer in mindset to the people who are wasted all the time.”

Laitman said that, even if they don’t provide special housing, a much larger number of schools provide what she calls “campus recovery communities ... a person and a place that help students in recovery meet.”

Currently, what best helps these students meet is an email address and AA meetings in the Princeton area. All of the students interviewed for this article said that they make no less than four and sometimes up to seven meetings in a week. 

Aronson said that “the University’s on-campus residential experience is intended to create a sense of community.” 

“The residential colleges are where many students live and eat, and colleges offer many opportunities for building a community of friends,” she explained.

What motivated the University to provide residential colleges should also motivate them to consider the request of the Recovery@ students, Walter said. “I think it’s a very similar sort of idea behind recovery housing,” he added, noting that peer support is especially necessary for students trying to stop drinking while in school or those who have only been sober for a few months.

While Carl said the residential college system was a big step forward in providing an alternative to the eating clubs, both he and Walter emphasized that there still exists a “barrier” to overcoming a sense that they lead “separate lives.”

While Carl noted that all the residential college social activities happen during times of AA meetings, he added that the barrier is mainly a social one.

“It’s really hard to identify with people who are, you know, just coming to college for the first time,” Summer said, referencing the differences in age and experience between the older, returning students and the rest of the underclassmen.

“We come back, we’re older than everyone else, have all these different experiences,” Walter said. “Sure, we can interact with the people who aren’t in AA, but oftentimes there isn’t really a high level of understanding of where we’re at, especially for people who are newer.” 

Staff writer Samantha Thiel contributed to this article.