The Men’s Resource Center provides a community to UO students where men can explore multiple ways to better themselves. Every November, MRC partners with various student organizations and operations, including Black Male Alliance and Substance Abuse Prevention and Education, to organize a month of activities and events.
November is Men’s Health Awareness month, therefore, the events were designed to educate men on their health and security.
“There are a number of health issues that are more relevant for men,” Coordinator of MRC, Arian Mobasser, said. “November is about raising awareness to those issues, developing, programming, and getting engaged and excited about addressing some of these issues.”
MRC and SAPE teamed up on a 3-part social media segment, “The Drinking Disparity.” The segment gave an insight to the drinking habits of men and a variety of support methods.
“Men tend to have much higher rates of alcoholism,” MRC student employee Oliver Hall said. “There’s this societal perception of your masculinity is tied to how much you could drink and what you drink, and it was a really clear interaction where we could work with SAPE to shed some light on this important and unnoticed issue,” Hall said.
According to the CDC, in 2020, 13% of men reported having an alcohol use disorder, compared to 9% of women.
Many UO students emphasized the college culture of partaking in drinking.
“People think that they have to drink to go out and be social,” UO student Quinn Wilcox said. “It’s the established culture. It’s almost weirder if you’re not drinking versus if you were.”
Wilcox said there’s a perception of drinking that students need to consume alcohol to not be seen as “weird.”
Substance abuse can cause significant effects to the lives of UO students. Alcoholism can impair memory and have long-lasting effects on the brain.
“There are a bunch of degenerate effects alcohol can have on the brain,” Hall said. “Especially for college students, the brain isn’t fully developed until you’re 25, so that can mess up cognition and development.”
According to the National Cancer Institute, a large amount of alcohol use can develop into various forms of alcohol-associated cancer.
“In college, we don’t really label [binge drinking] as a problem because it’s the standard,” Wilcox said. “When you leave college, you might have to face that reality.”
Binge drinking is considered having 5 or more drinks in a sitting in 2 hours.
“There’s a stigma around men’s health and mental health too,” Wilcox said.
“When you ask a college student how much the average college student drinks, they always overestimate the amount that other people drink,” Mobasser said. “Creating this perception that everyone is drinking a lot more or at higher amounts, which can influence how people think.”
Mobasser said that college students tend to overdrink due to a social perception of other people’s drinking rates.
The 3-part segment also highlighted how alcohol distributors contribute to the alcohol use culture.
“A lot of alcohol is targeted towards men. In the U.S., people tend to inherently associate alcohol with social functions,” Hall said. “The only way that men can only socialize with men is through drinking.”
Hall said that the association of social events and alcohol is how alcohol disruptors contribute to alcohol use.
SAPE and the MRC cumulatively provide several support systems to students affected by alcohol abuse.
“We don’t have a sobriety requirement,” Assistant Director of Substance Misuse and Prevention Alexis Drakatos said. “We meet students where they’re at, to help them figure out what they’re needing.”
Similarly, MRC supplies students with “safe and more supported spaces, in which guys can reflect on their relationship to substances and coping more generally,” Mobasser said.
The Collegiate Recovery Center and the UO Counseling Services additionally provide support systems to students in recovery.
