Funferal

Students and health

A survey out today on third level students in Ireland is being reported as very worrying by RTÉ. Among the reported issues are that one in ten students have engaged in unsafe sexual beahviour and that:

Similar amounts of money were spent on food, an essential and on alcohol, a non-essential.

To put things another way, 90% of students have not engaged in unsafe sexual behaviour. Regarding the spending issue, I’m not sure that this is quite as disturbing as is implied. Alcoholic drinks cost so much now – around EUR5 a piece in clubs – that drinking in the range recommended by health experts would mean that spending similar amounts on food could actually be a tight but acceptable amount, depending on how diligent students are in their spending choices. I’d actually guess that students are spending somewhat more on food, given the wording in the report, but unfortunately the Department of Health have nothing on their site about the report so I don’t know.
Not to make little of the survey findings, but the RTÉ report seems read it through a completely negative lens. There are some important findings. The mental health issue, glossed over by RTÉ, is important. The fact that 43% of sexually-active female students have used the morning-after pill is important. But how? Does it indicate that emergency contraception is widely available to students? Should it be more widely available, and how might this be achieved (e.g. over-the-counter, more family planning services)? Does it indicate that more students should be using regular forms of contraception (condoms, the pill)? If so, how might this be achieved?
It would also be useful to know how often students use emergency contraception – that is whether it is generally a once-off occurence or is being used by (some) students on a regular basis to substitute for other forms of contraception.