“Approximately one out of every ten alcoholic drinks in the United States is consumed illegally. Despite 21 being the legal drinking age, children as young as 12 years old have engaged in under-age alcoholism. In fact, more than 70% of teens have consumed at least one alcoholic beverage by the time they reach age 18” (American Addiction Centers). 

Teen alcoholism is a growing issue that poses a significant threat to the physical and mental health of young individuals. Despite the obvious dangers of underage drinking, many teenagers still struggle with alcohol abuse, often due to peer pressure or a lack of support from those around them. To address this issue, two Dublin High School students founded MyAlcoholStory, a website/mobile app where students can share stories about their past experiences regarding alcohol abuse with complete anonymity and privacy under a user alias. 

MyAlcoholStory was co-founded by Anit Annadi and Cyril Joby in 2022 with the goal of bringing awareness to teen alcoholism and creating a safe environment where students can share their experiences free of judgment and stigma. Annadi and Joby were inspired to found MyAlcoholStory after realizing how “platforms like Alcoholics Anonymous were geared towards adults.” Additionally, existing platforms addressing alcoholism were “super confrontational…which might scare off teenagers from getting the help that they need.” 

This was an incredibly ambitious project; naturally, when Annadi and Joby first founded MyAlcoholStory, they were met with many challenges. “At the beginning, making the platform was hard, since a lot of experience in coding was required.” Consequently, Annadi and Joby “spent a lot of time learning the programming languages necessary,” but once they were able to learn it, “the website was coded pretty fast.” Additionally, Annadi and Joby faced legal issues. Because they wanted to keep their platform completely anonymous, Annadi and Joby had to “look into a lot of legal [affairs] to make sure what they were doing [went] by the law.” 

Despite these complications, Annadi and Joby have pushed through. Since launching, MyAlcoholStory has gained about 100 users, and got about  20 posts within the first week. 

Annadi and Joby have many more plans for the future: soon, users will be asked to share their birth date, which will help connect them with other people in a certain age range. On top of new and innovative application features, Annadi explains how he has hopes for expanding the organization to places like “India and Africa since places like these don’t have widespread awareness on the harms of teen alcoholism.” The co-founders are extremely excited to bring out MyAlcoholStory’s endless potential, and will continue to work tirelessly to make sure that people all across the country are able to get help when they need it.  

Click here to see a demo of MyAlcoholStory’s website/app! 

To learn more, visit the MyAlcoholStory’s website or find them on Instagram @my.alcohol.story.