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Photos by Will James
In a small room inside Stony Brook Southampton’s Student Center one recent Friday afternoon, 20 students knelt down and began jamming the plastic chests of mannequins arranged on mats across the floor.
Then, as instructed by campus police officers, they tilted back the mannequins’s hinged chins, pinched their rubbery noses and practiced filling their lungs with oxygen.
The college students were learning how to save the lives of their peers, by keeping their blood oxygenated and moving, should they ever drink so much that they suffer alcohol poisoning. It was part of a new program started at Stony Brook University, called the Red Watch Band Movement, which aims to teach college students across the country how to avoid and prevent death by alcohol poisoning.
The training session was the second of its kind offered at Stony Brook Southampton. Most of the students attending the training session, which was held on November 6, said they were drawn to it for the same reasons: for the chance to intervene and save a friend’s life should a party ever take a turn for the worse.
“I’m tired of people being afraid to help their friends,” said Jessica Adamowicz, 18, a marine science major from Queens. “There’s nothing to be afraid of except your friend dying.”
She said that when a friend hit his head on a counter when he got drunk and passed out at a party last month, the moment stuck with her and spurred her to seek out the program.
The Red Watch Band Movement launched this spring after Suzanne Fields, the head of Geriatric and Internal Medicine at Stony Brook, lost her son Mathew Sunshine to alcohol poisoning when he was a freshman at Northwestern University in 2008. To date, 48 campuses nationwide are running the program, or have it in the works, according to Lara Hunter, the program’s nationwide coordinator.
Ms. Hunter attributed the program’s success to the way organizers are teaching the instruction—informational, instead of reproachful.
“It’s not a preachy program,” she said. “It’s not an abstinence-based philosophy.”
Students get a red watch upon completing the training. It is meant to symbolize the idea that every second counts in cases of alcohol poisoning.
Every one of the students who attends the Red Watch Band training becomes CPR-certified by the end of the four-hour class. But that is just one piece of the puzzle. They also learn how to spot the signs that someone has become life-threateningly drunk, how to intervene and get them to put the bottle down, and how to know when it is time to call for help. In training, students practice these skills by acting out skits.
The most recent training session was run through the Southampton campus’s counseling center and aided by its fire marshal, Michael Kampf. In a lecture, Ginny St. John, the senior counsellor at Stony Brook Southampton, aimed to dispel myths about alcohol poisoning, like the notion that a person can “sleep it off” when they drink themselves sick.
That is how Dr. Fields’s son died, according to Ms. St. John. His friends let him go to sleep, and he never woke up.
Nick Colonna, 20, a marine vertebrate biology major, said the most valuable thing he got from his Red Watch Band training was the ability to admit when it is time to call 911.
“That’s the big step that has to be taken,” he said.
Mr. Colonna, who commutes from Rocky Point, went through the training during the first session on September 9 and returned to attend this month’s session as a peer instructor. He was drawn to the program because he grew up around friends who drank heavily, and often had to take care of them when they got sick or out of control.
“I learned some things in my own life that I applied, but this perfected the things I knew,” he said.
Both the September and November training sessions at the Southampton campus were filled to capacity, with 20 students attending each one. About 500 students attend the campus.
The next step, Ms. St. John said, is to take a version of the program to area high schools. She said Stony Brook Southampton will soon begin offering to either train staff at local high schools so officials can teach the program, or send the college’s staff to teach it themselves.
Amy Phillips, a social work intern at the counseling center and one of the Red Watch Band Movement instructors, said that while there are a lot of anti-drinking programs out there, this one stands out.
“I think this one’s effective because we’re not really saying ‘don’t drink,’” she said. “We’re educating them. We’re teaching them how to save a friend’s life.”
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