Dry November calls on Hungarian women to quit drinking for a month

This November, the Hungarian Blue Point Foundation organises their annual Dry November for the third time. The foci of this year’s campaign are women and their alcohol consumption. Alcohol is extremely unhealthy for everyone, but it can be much more dangerous to women than men, Index.hu reports.

Kék Pont Alapítvány (Blue Point Foundation) is a public benefit company that was founded in 1996. Blue Point “provides comprehensive and coordinated healthcare, social and legal services for psychoactive substance users”. They started their Dry November Campaign three years ago. The campaign aims to raise awareness of the dangers of alcohol consumption, like how frequent consumption can lead to substance abuse and various health problems.

Drinking has long been a serious issue in Hungary, as we are one of the heaviest drinkers in Europe. Another chart that we are leading, for example, is the No. of teenagers who have been drunk at least twice at the age of 15. We are No. 1 with boys and No. 3 with girls.

Photo: Kék Pont Alapítvány (www.kekpont.hu)

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The rules of the campaign are very simple: if you would like to participate in Dry November, all you have to do is quit drinking alcohol for the whole month.

You can read about last year’s Dry November below:

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The campaign seems to achieve its goal.

Last year, ELTE asked people who took part in Dry November to complete a survey (unfortunately, not all Dry November participants completed the survey, so the statistics do not represent everyone who participated, only those who filled out the survey).

Based on last year’s study, 76.15% of the participants managed to avoid alcohol completely for the whole month.

Even the people who could not go a full month without alcohol reported drinking much less than usual.

Women in the centre

This year’s campaign focuses especially on the alcohol consumption of women. Even in 2018, it is more or less a taboo to talk about women’s alcohol consumption in Hungary.

It is considered „shameful” or „unladylike” behaviour if a woman drinks alcohol.

Index even goes as far as writing that women’s alcohol consumption is, in some cases, regulated by men (their partners or husbands).

National trends show that women tend to drink alcohol to cope with emotional pain, depression, stress or anxiety. Heavy drinking increases the risk of many serious diseases such as liver problems, brain damage or even breast cancer. Women also react differently to alcohol consumption than men. For example,

women can become addicts much quicker than men.

On the illustration below, you can see the difference between the average age of men and women when “having the first drink”, “being drunk for the first time”, “the first problems appear” and “first treatment”.