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This was another, unfortunately familiar, alarm clock for Sarah Hepola. Much of his memory of the previous night was empty. She remembers talking to people at a party, but then a shadow fell on her memories.
How did she get here? Where did they put the seal that he had in his hand? Who bought the pizza? Who was the man next to him?
"I was like, well, it's weird, I do not know what happened … I laughed a little, it seemed normal to me" , he recalls. that my 12-year-old daughter had to prepare food "
This type of memory loss happened again and again in Hepola, and at an early age, I often felt as if" under me a trap was open, in the form of a secret door … I woke up the next day and it was like I was in a different place. "
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I was suffering from power cuts caused by alcohol, a familiar term with potentially serious consequences, as the word suggests, in this state all the memories of the night, after a point, darken.Some drinkers suffer from less serious fragment failures, where only pieces of memory are lost.
Hepola's regular power outages have not triggered any of them. Alarms at that moment.Only, when he saw it in perspective, he realized that he had a re "conflictual" lation with alcohol, experiences that he had written in a book.
If this type of amnesia after drinking alcohol seems familiar, that's because
Women with antecedents Sexual badault are more likely to be revictimized if they experience a breakdown of alcohol, according to experts
. that more than half of college drinkers have experienced a certain level of blackout when asked about their drinking habits, while a survey of more than 2,000 teenagers, freshly released high school, found only 20% in the last six months.
"Fifteen years ago, we would not have accepted that these phenomena are common," says Aaron White, of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and D & # 39; 39; alcohol. ism in the United States.
He spent most of his career studying drunkenness. "Now we all know that people [muchas] are suffering from power outages."
Scientists are further revealing why failures occur and why they affect more than others, helping them to better understand this phenomenon and, hopefully, to avoid its negative consequences.
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For many decades, it was thought that only alcoholics suffered from memory failures due to drunkenness. This idea has only changed until recent studies show it. A strange series of experiments, which today would not be approved by ethics, revealed some surprising ideas.
In the late 1960s, a researcher named Donald Goodwin recruited alcoholics from hospitals and workplaces to determine what was happening. I remember, in a state of intoxication, he disappears.
He discovered that out of 100 alcoholics, more than 60 have experienced regular breakdowns, some total and some fragmentary.
He also revealed that people experiencing a breakdown can act remarkably coherently. For example, he showed that during intoxication, subjects used immediate memory "unhindered" and were even able to "get out of bed." perform simple calculations. But they forgot about them 30 minutes later
Some experts say that people should not always seem to be intoxicated with alcohol to suffer a breakdown.
In the final stages, he administers whiskey. to alcoholics (up to 18 ounces, or half a liter, in four hours) and presented situations designed to "provide memorable experiences that sober people have no difficulty remembering." [19659002InoneheshowedparticipantsbadgraphyandthenaskedthemdetailedquestionsaboutwhattheyhadseenInanotherwithastoveinhishandheaskedpeoplewhentheywerehungryWhentheyansweredhetoldthemthatthepanhaddeadmiceinside30minuteslaterthedrunksubjectshadforgottenthesememoriesandcouldnotremembertheeventsofthenextdayHowevertheycouldremembertheseeventsuntiltwominuteslaterrevealingthattheirshort-termmemorywasworking
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experiments have been done with alcoholics, have prepared the ground to understand, even how non-alcoholics act during a blackout. Today, these experiences are still influential in part because – for obvious ethical reasons – scientists can not induce with alcohol the memory loss of their participants. Instead, they should be based on questionnaires of past events.
Memory fragments, which are completely lost during a power failure, reveal what is happening in the brain. It is thought that the hippocampus – the brain structure responsible for weaving incoming information and creating memories of everyday events – is momentarily damaged. Thus, White, who has studied the process at the cellular level with rodent brains, interrupts the central brain circuits, which create episodic memories, that is to say: "
" We believe that Much of what happens is that alcohol removes the hippocampus, leaving it unable to create this continuous record of events, "he says. "It's like a blank in a recording."
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In the rat, White shows that there are doses of alcohol where the Cerebral cells "still work", and that with higher doses are completely inactive. This explains why, in partial failures, only fragments are lost.
But White also explains another phenomenon: while this is happening, two other important areas of the brain, which feed the hippocampus information about what is happening in the world, they suppress when we drink alcohol. It is the frontal lobe – the reasoning area of the brain, which we use when we pay attention to something – and the amygdala – the area that warns us of danger –
Risk Factors
We now know of other factors that affect absences, such as drinking If you are fasting or have not slept very much, another important risk is the speed with which alcohol is consumed, because the faster we drink, the faster our blood alcohol level increases. between 0.20% and 0.30% can cause a total failure.This level could be reached, for four hours, before 15 average or larger drinks available in the United Kingdom, by bad and body weight.
But alcohol levels in the blood do not explain why only some people lose whole pieces of his memory, while others who drink similar amounts do not. A 2016 study, conducted by Ralph Hingson, also of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, provided some answers.
"The frequency with which people reported excess and drunkenness over the past month played a role as they smoked and took more of a psychoactive drug. "
Fainting is more common in people with lower body weight, and is also more common among students known to drink alcohol before going to social gatherings. or parties, and that quickly increase their blood alcohol level, "says Hingson
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Women are also more likely to Power outages, they are on average smaller than men and have a higher percentage of body fat.Dilute the alcohol you drink, which is why your blood alcohol level increases more quickly.
In 2017, Amie Haas, of Palo Al University to, California, discovered that women tend to suffer from blackouts. than men.A study in 2015 showed that women who consumed just one drink more than usual, were 13% more likely to faint than men.
Apart from bad differences, they could be a genetic component that dictates who is more prone to power outages. For example, they are usually children of mothers with alcohol problems.
Another study, conducted on more than 1,000 pairs of twins, revealed that there are genetic connections that affect half of the experienced breakdowns.
It also seems to develop in the brain. A longitudinal study of adolescents aged 12 to 21, led by Reagan Wetherill of the University of Pennsylvania, showed that some people who abuse alcohol and experience power cuts were less able to to repress their actions. It is possible to see this in brain scans, even before they have drunk alcohol.
Power outages are often times of disruption where people accept their problem and ask for professional help. "In general, there seems to be genetic and brain vulnerabilities that put a person at risk," he says.
Worse, studies on mice suggest that excessive consumption of alcohol results in additional changes in the brain. It is also worrying that the same people who are more prone to power outages – teenagers and students – are at a more vulnerable age in terms of physical appearance. "There's more and more evidence that, especially, if you're younger, it's not safe for a developing brain," says Haas
because teens are more sensitive to the effects alcohol. One reason for this is that the frontal lobe of the brain is the last to develop, around the age of 25 years.
Pbadages of consent
Like risk factors, the consequences of power outages are not only worse for teenagers, but also for women.
Haas et al. Showed that women who experience blackouts are more likely to engage in risky badual behaviors than men and drinkers. . These women also showed more feelings of regret the next day
Evidence also shows that women with a history of badual badault are more likely to be revictimized if they are victims of a badual badault. alcohol breakdown, compared to compulsive drinkers. they did not lose consciousness. Indeed, they run the risk of making bad decisions when they are under the influence of alcohol, especially when it comes to badessing situations that could be dangerous. In addition, they are also at risk later, because they can not trust their memories.
This means that there is a vicious circle. Those experiencing power outages may be more vulnerable, at the time, to potential attackers. But if they try to lay charges later, they may also dismiss their case.
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That's right, even in places where there is "affirmative consent", where there is a badual badault unless someone has indicated his willingness. "In situations where" he said / she said ", you should rely on the evidence to determine if the consent has been granted or not, "says Wetherill.
If one of the parties fails, it complicates the evidence, for example, in Canada, consent is required Recently, in a survey of Globe & Mail he found that the courts preferred whistleblowers who may have suffered a partial breakdown, but that they did not consider the complainant to be a reliable source of information.
A good first step to protect yourself against alcohol breakdowns is to monitor drinking drinks and asking their friends to do the same
In the United States, meanwhile, laws vary by state. Most laws say that a "mentally disabled" person can not give consent. But New York, for example, says that mental incapacity is only legally valid if a drink or drug was inadvertently received, not because she chose to drink.
States that include having consumed alcohol voluntarily, on the other hand On the other hand, they often include a warning that the defendant must have reasonably realized that the person was incapable. But as people who experience a power outage may seem very functional, defendants may claim not to have noticed.
"It's complicated because people can lose consciousness and look pretty sober," White says. "You do not always have to get drunk to suffer from a power outage."
Sarah Hepola has extensive experience in this type of disconnection. She says that during her power outages, she was functional. He participated in conversations and answered jokes, just as Goodwin's subjects could do calculations. Only those who knew her well could recognize her appearance as "glbady, disjointed eyes" when she experienced a blackout. "It was as if no one was at home … like he was talking but did not equate the things that they told me."
No matter how she was seen by others, Hepola knows that she was not in her good sense. I really think that my decisions have been altered, "says Hepola," I was very impulsive, extremely careless and exhibitionist, even badually aggressive, sometimes in a way that did not have any meaning for me the next day … depending on what "
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" An individual may experience a breakdown of consciousness and give the l ". feel like giving consent, but in reality they do not know it "
Similarly, the University of Michigan states:" By law, a person intoxicated can not consent to badual activity., which means that badual intimacy with someone who is "mentally incompetent" meets the legal definition of badual badault. "
For this reason, it does not Is not surprising that a person who experiences this type of failure is also p Read more likely to suffer from other negative consequences of drinking alcohol, from the most mundane – not meeting appointments or being late to work at the most serious – such as an injury or overdose of substances illegal. . This makes power outages a useful marker and a way to predict harmful behaviors.
For these reasons, questions about alcohol breakdowns are increasingly being used in questionnaires and screening mechanisms to determine if anyone is an alcohol lover. or problematic
Detecting power outages
Mary-Beth Miller, psychologist of addiction at the University of Missouri, discovered a simple intervention technique that could help consumers to reduce the use of alcohol example in the veterans of the army and later in the university drinkers.
The intervention is called "normative personalized feedback". It's an online quiz that asks people about their drinking habits and reports how much they drink compared to other people of similar age and background.
Power outages, discovered by the team, serve as "breakages that people can learn and are more likely to respond to the intervention. "
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Detection questionnaires on the consumption of the drug. Alcohol now regularly ask questions about experiences with previous power outages, something that makes it easy to find people who need help.It is not effective, for example, to ask that the amount of alcohol that a person has consumed. "If you specifically look for power outages, the badessment will be more accurate, rather than trying to incite all the world at the clinic to intervene, "says Miller
.One half of college drinkers experienced some decline in alcohol consumption
These interventions cost time and are expensive, which makes Miller hope that She and her colleagues can take advantage of this to develop more effective interventions. 19659002] She hopes to foster a culture of drinking in which people understand that "there is no need to get lost completely to have a good time".
Other researchers hope to ask questions about other types of risk behaviors. "In summary, it's interesting that the blackout is one of the most negative consequences of alcohol consumption and could be an indicator of more complex problems," says Haas [19659027]. better monitor your alcohol consumption and ask your friends to do the same. It's easier said than done.
Hepola can see warning signs as he looks to the past. Even at that time, she knew that "I did not want to be so drunk", but could not stop drinking.
"Some disordered behaviors become jokes and normalize, and sometimes we distance ourselves from emotional and physical damage causes [el alcohol]," says Hepola
Now she has been sober for eight years and is happy not to fall into the dark traps of memory loss. At the moment, his life has become much simpler, he says.
You can read the original note in English on BBC
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