Answer Addiction

Tag: alcohol use disorder

  • Bam Margera's Family Reportedly Admits Star Into Treatment Facility

    Bam Margera's Family Reportedly Admits Star Into Treatment Facility

    After a series of irate videos hit the internet, family members are reportedly helping the Jackass star receive mental health treatment. 

    After a 10-day stint in treatment earlier this year, family and friends have now reportedly committed former Jackass star Bam Margera into a behavioral health facility. 

    Concerns about Margera stemmed from recent Instagram videos in which he ranted about his wife, Nicole Boyd, Philly Voice reports. The videos have now been removed from his account.

    Then, according to the Philly Voice, another video came to light of Margera threatening his manager and refusing to attend his appearance at a comedy club in New York.  

    TMZ reports that while entering treatment has to do with alcohol use, family and friends also believe Margera may have a personality disorder as well. 

    Earlier this week, Margera’s sister-in-law Kelly Margera posted on Instagram asking for prayers and support during this time. Margera’s wife also shared the post. 

    “Addiction is a scary and complicated disease. A family disease,” Kelly’s post reads. “Giving and receiving help is a process that is not always easy to navigate. What our family needs right now are not your words, opinions, IG comments and Facebook shares. We need your prayers, prayer is a powerful thing, and until you’ve walked in our shoes on this journey with us, you have no idea.”

    Margera has been to treatment three times previously, according to Pop Culture. In the past, he has talked about the death of his co-star Ryan Dunn and how that has played a role in his drinking.

    “I have spent enough time grieving over Ryan Dunn through alcohol,” Margera previously stated. “I’m 39 years old, the party is over. I don’t plan on drinking anymore. I have wasted too much time at the bad and all my friends who needed decades of help are now all sober. I would like to join the sober parade.”

    Margera has reportedly been sober on and off, and even shared a video of himself ending seven months of sobriety at one point, Pop Culture reports.  

    As Margera enters treatment, two of his previous co-stars on Jackass, Brandon Novak and Steve-O, are celebrating milestones in their own recovery. Both have struggled with substance use disorder. 

    Novak took part in in-patient treatment 13 times before getting sober, Philly Voice reports, and he spoke at a drug court graduation recently. 

    Steve-O celebrated 11 years of sobriety on Monday, March 11 and commemorated the occasion on Instagram.

    “Eleven years clean and sober today, and I couldn’t be more grateful… Thanks to everyone who wished me a “happy birthday”!” his post read. 

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Five Finger Death Punch's Ivan Moody Is One Year Sober

    Five Finger Death Punch's Ivan Moody Is One Year Sober

    “I’m speechless man. A lot of people didn’t think I’d make it 24 hours. To be honest with you there were times I didn’t either,” Moody said.

    Ivan Moody, the lead singer in the rock band Five Finger Death Punch, celebrated one year of sobriety over the weekend, according to his bandmate. 

    “I’m speechless man,” Moody said in an emotional Instagram video. “A lot of people didn’t think I’d make it 24 hours. To be honest with you there were times I didn’t either.” 

    He took time to acknowledge the people who are fighting to stay sober. 

    “I’m with you every step of the way, whether you have 24 hours or 24 years,” he said. “Keep the fight man.” 

    Chris Kael, the group’s bassist, recently achieved his own year of sobriety, and he took to Instagram to help acknowledge Moody’s accomplishment. 

    “Join me in celebrating @ivanmoody today on his One Year Sober Birthday! Roughly 75 percent of those who start the path to sobriety don’t make it a full year,” he wrote. “I’ve seen firsthand the work that Ivan has done through 365 consecutive days to get himself to this HUGE milestone. I’ve seen the amazing, positive changes in him over this past year that have gotten closer and closer to the man we all knew he could be. I’m proud of you, my friend. As are countless people you have inspired along the way. Keep that shit up! #ShitYesSon #SoberAsFuck #PresentAsFuck #IvanAsFuck”

    Moody had tried to get sober before, but always found himself relapsing, according to Blabbermouth. 

    “Recovery, you have to be committed; it’s an honest program, and I wasn’t being honest with myself at the time. I’m very, very proud of the progress I’ve made,” Moody said on a radio appearance last September. 

    Moody said that he could count on fellow sober rockers when he needed fellowship. 

    “Rob Halford [of Judas Priest] is the person that I called a lot of the time when I was in recovery,” he said. “I think he’s been sober now for going on 40 years — maybe, I think, a little longer than that; I could be wrong. But Jamey Jasta [of Hatebreed] — another one. Jamey’s been sober now for 18 years; Jonathan Davis [of Korn]; so on and so forth. So these were all people that I looked to when I was struggling, and I was very, very lucky and blessed to have them on my team.”

    Moody nearly died from alcohol at one point, and he said that since he’s been sober it’s like he’s living a new life. 

    He said, “I feel I took a nap for about four years and I woke up one day and I saw somebody else wearing my skin. It was like Rip Van Winkle; it was really odd. I feel better than I felt in years, which is really… it’s a plus.”

    In addition to Moody and Kael, Five Finger Death Punch’s former drummer Jeremy Spencer is also sober. 

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Ben Affleck Opens Up About Alcoholism

    Ben Affleck Opens Up About Alcoholism

    “Some people are sort of uncomfortable, but it doesn’t really bother me to talk about alcoholism. Being an alcoholic is part of my life; it’s something I deal with,” Affleck said.

    Over the years, Ben Affleck has been increasingly transparent with the public about the place that drinking has had in his life, and in a recent interview with Today, he continued that honesty.

    “I had a problem and I really want to address it and I take some pride in that,” he told Hoda Kotb. “It’s about yourself, your life, your family… we encounter these kinds of hurdles and we have to deal with them.”

    Affleck continued, “I mean, some people are sort of uncomfortable, but it doesn’t really bother me to talk about alcoholism. Being an alcoholic is part of my life; it’s something I deal with.”

    While alcoholism is something that Affleck lives with, he’s determined not to let it define him.

    “It doesn’t have to subsume my whole identity and be everything but it is something that you have to work at,” he said.

    In 2012, Affleck interviewed with Barbara Walters and explained how alcoholism had defined his childhood.

    “[My father] was an alcoholic… I did know that as a child. He drank a lot. My father was a—what did they call him—a real alcoholic. He, you know, drank all day, drank every day, and to his credit, he got sober ultimately. He’s been sober for several decades, which I think is pretty impressive.”

    Affleck stopped drinking at age 24, after he and Matt Damon won the Oscar for their movie Good Will Hunting.

    Then in 2001, after a highly-publicized break-up with Gwyneth Paltrow, Charlie Sheen drove Affleck to Malibu Promises. “I went to rehab for being 29 and partying too much and not having a lot of boundaries and to clear my head and try to get some idea of who I wanted to be,” Affleck later told The Hollywood Reporter.

    From 2004 until 2018, Affleck was married to Jennifer Garner. Married life with three kids was quiet until Garner and Affleck split, and since then Affleck has had a series of semi-public incidents with alcohol, the last culminating in having alcohol delivered to his house.

    Shortly after, toward the end of 2018, the actor was photographed in the back of a car with Garner driving him to rehab.

    On Today, Affleck called Garner a “great mom” and said he was lucky to co-parent with her.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Daniel Radcliffe Used Alcohol To Cope With Fame

    Daniel Radcliffe Used Alcohol To Cope With Fame

    Radcliffe discussed his past relationship with alcohol and decision to get sober on “Off Camera With Sam Jones.”

    Actor Daniel Radcliffe, who shot to fame when he was cast as Harry Potter, said that he used alcohol to cope with his sudden fame. 

    Radcliffe was discussing his sobriety on “Off Camera With Sam Jones.” According to E! News, Radcliffe was uncomfortable with how often he was recognized in his teens after he starred in the Harry Potter films. He would drink to cope with that anxiety, but realized that just led to more attention. 

    “There is an awareness that I really struggled with particularly in my late teens when I was going out to places for the first time where you would feel…again it could have largely been in my head but…you would feel watched when you went into a bar, when you went into a pub,” said Radcliffe, who is now 29. “Then, in my case, the quickest way of forgetting about the fact that you were being watched was to get very drunk and then as you get very drunk, you become aware that, oh people are watching more now because now I’m getting very drunk, so I should probably drink more to ignore that more.”

    Radcliffe said that it took him some time to break this cycle, but he was able to do it with the help of family. 

    “It took a few years and it took a couple of attempts. Ultimately, it was my own decision…I woke up one morning after a night going, ‘This is probably not good.’”

    He said in part his excessive drinking was an attempt to reconcile his new lifestyle. 

    “When I think of the sort of chaos that I used to invite into my life, I’m really much happier now and I think there was some part of me that was like actors have to be like crazy, cool drunks. I have to live up to this weird image that I have in my head of what it is to be a famous actor or something.”

    He also felt that he couldn’t be open about the downsides of his fame. 

    “Part of the thing is the expectation that you should just be delighted all the time. You have a great job, you’re wealthy, you don’t have a right to ever feel sad or to not be excited about the whole thing all the time and I think that’s a pressure as well.”

    Despite the challenges, he said he’s still grateful for the role that defined his career. 

    “Even at the lowest point, I still loved my job so much and I loved going to set and there was never a day where my own shit would affect how I was on set. There was never a point where I was like ‘I wished this didn’t happen to me. I wish I wasn’t Harry Potter,’ like that just didn’t happen.”

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Comedian Rob Delaney Celebrates 17 Years Of Sobriety

    Comedian Rob Delaney Celebrates 17 Years Of Sobriety

    The Catastrophe actor took to Instagram to pen a somber note about his sober milestone and his late son.

    Rob Delaney, creator and star of the celebrated Amazon Prime show, Catastrophe, announced his 17th year of sobriety on February 4th. This milestone is all the more meaningful for the comedian, who nearly a year ago lost his toddler son, Henry, to cancer.

    On Monday, Delaney wrote about his sober anniversary and his son Henry in a reflective post. Henry died in January 2018 after struggling with brain cancer. Rob and wife Leah Delaney had three boys, and not long after Henry’s death, another son was born.

    Delaney wrote on Instagram:

    “As of today I’ve been sober 17 years. 17 years ago I was in jail in a wheelchair. Today I’m not. I am profoundly grateful to the alcoholics who shined a light on the path for me and helped equip me with the skills to live life well.”

    In his memoir Rob Delaney: Mother. Wife. Sister. Human. Warrior. Falcon. Yardstick. Turban. Cabbage. wrote about his drunk-driving accident that landed him in jail and rehab.

    “Twelve years ago I was in jail, in a wheelchair. The hospital gown I was in was covered in blood from my bleeding face. My top front right tooth was missing a piece. My right arm and my left wrist were broken. They were broken so badly they both required surgery. My knees had slammed into the dashboard of the car I was driving the night before and split open to the bone. They weren’t broken, but they’d been operated on and sewed shut in the emergency room of Cedars-Sinai hospital, just before I went to jail.”

    “This has been a brutal year for my family and me,” Delaney continued on Instagram. “Our first year without our son and brother Henry. Had I not been sober it would have been far worse. As it was, I squeaked by,” he confessed.

    “Sobriety allowed me to be a reasonably good dad, husband and worker though it all. (If you average it out. I think.) Sobriety allows me to grieve fully, and grief is an expression of love. Thank you to everyone who has helped me. I can’t do it alone.”

    Delaney announced on Facebook in February 2018 that his son Henry had died of cancer. Henry was diagnosed with a brain tumor in 2016, and after treatment the cancer reoccured in fall 2017.

    “Henry was a joy. He was smart, funny, and mischievous and we had so many wonderful adventures together,” Delaney wrote at the time. “Thank you, beautiful Henry, for spending as much time with us as you did. We miss you so much.”

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Great White's Mark Kendall On Sobriety: I Won't Drink Today No Matter What Happens

    Great White's Mark Kendall On Sobriety: I Won't Drink Today No Matter What Happens

    “I don’t care if I have guns pointed at me — I’m not drinking. That’s how serious I am,” the Great White guitarist said at a recent recovery event. 

    Mark Kendall, founding guitarist for the legendary rock band Great White, doesn’t say that he’ll never drink again, despite his decade of sobriety. Instead, he focuses on staying sober just for today. 

    “Nobody’s ever gonna hear me say, ‘I’ll never drink again,’ or, ‘I’m done.’ I just don’t go there. I don’t put these impossible tasks [in front of me]. ‘Cause I don’t know if I’ll never drink again; I can’t tell you if that’ll happen. But what I can tell you is that I’m not gonna drink today no matter what happens,” Kendall said as part of the No More Heroin Survivor Stories. 

    “I don’t care if I have guns pointed at me — I’m not drinking. That’s how serious I am. And I know it sounds stupid simple to some of our audience out there, but when I do it this way and just leave the task to be today…I’m just not gonna drink today. Yesterday, whatever happened, I don’t know; I don’t wanna think about it. I probably didn’t drink though.”

    As for tomorrow, Kendall says he’s not concerned with it.  

    “I’m not concerned about something that takes care of itself. Time takes care of itself. Years are gonna go by all by themselves. The only thing that I can control with confidence is being sober today only — that’s my task. If I make it to midnight, I’ve made it through another day. That’s the way I’ve done it, and 10 years rolled by. It’s not like I sat there one day and [went], ‘You know what? I think I’m gonna be sober for 10 years. I’m just gonna go for it.’ I never did that.”

    Kendall struggled with alcoholism and started toying with sobriety in 1991, according to Blabbermouth. However, he didn’t give sobriety his all until 2008, which is when it clicked for him, he said. 

    “I’d try it and then I’d quit again. So I’d literally keep starting and stopping and keep trying it again — try to drink like the normal guy that just watches the football game on the weekends with his buddies and has, like, four beers. I wanna be that guy and not wake up the next day and have to drink again. So I’d force it and not drink, so I could tell myself that I’m normal now. But then again, here it comes again — I’d end up in pain,” Kendall said. “So I kept trying and trying and trying — going two years, a year and a half, a year, another two years. And keep trying and trying.”

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Alcohol-Related Liver Disease Is Affecting New Demographics

    Alcohol-Related Liver Disease Is Affecting New Demographics

    Alcohol-related liver damage used to be associated with older men but new statistics suggest that the disease is now increasingly affecting younger people.

    A new troubling trend is on the rise with regard to alcoholic liver disease, or ALD.

    Over the years, as young people began to drink more and more, related problems began to arise. College-aged-kids going into alcoholic comas, becoming injured or dying during drunken frat-house parties have become a pressing concern, and now doctors are seeing ALD in more younger Americans.

    ALD used to be considered “an old man’s disease,” Michigan Medicine liver specialist Jessica Mellinger, MD, told Michigan Health. Onset symptoms of alcoholic liver disease include chronic fatigue, poor appetite, itchy skin and abdominal pain and swelling. 

    A national study led by Mellinger and colleagues looked at seven years of data from over 100 million U.S. residents with insurance. “One of the scariest statistics out there that my colleagues unveiled in a study is that cirrhosis mortality related to alcohol use increased the most in people 25 to 34 years old,” Mellinger said. 

    Between 1999 and 2016, there was an average increase around 10% every year of young people who died from alcohol-related liver damage.

    “This is really dramatic and mirrors what we are seeing in the clinic,” Mellinger notes. “It signals that more alcohol abuse is occurring.”

    The research found that more women than men had alcohol-related cirrhosis of the liver over the seven-year study, with women at a 50% increase and men at 30%. Over one-third of cirrhosis cases in the study were related to alcohol.

    Men and women absorb and metabolize alcohol differently, leaving women more vulnerable to liver damage. And women also have less body water, so women and men with the same amount of alcohol consumption will have different blood alcohol concentrations.

    Mellinger also believes that American culture plays a part in women’s drinking. “There is this ‘mommy juice’ culture, this ‘mommy juice’ humor involving wine that’s normalizing drinking in a bad way,” she told Michigan Health. “There is nothing funny about alcoholic liver disease.”

    In addition, Dr. Vijay Shah, head of the Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology at the Mayo Clinic, told NPR that the study’s emphasis on American youth is new.

    “Alcohol-related liver cirrhosis used to be considered a disease that would happen after 30 years of heavy alcohol consumption,” Shah said. “But this study is showing that these problems are actually occurring in individuals in their 20s and 30s.”

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Trump Donates $100,000 To Alcoholism Research

    Trump Donates $100,000 To Alcoholism Research

    The president committed to donating his annual $400,000 salary to worthy causes as part of his 2016 campaign.

    President Donald Trump has donated $100,000 to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), a federal agency and branch of the National Institutes of Health.

    The $100,000 comes from his $400,000 yearly salary as president, which he promised to donate to worthy causes as part of his 2016 campaign. He has so far given away $100,00 each quarter to government departments including Veterans Affairs, the Small Business Administration, and the National Park Service.

    Alcoholism has touched the president personally. His brother, Fred Trump Jr., died from complications related to alcoholism in 1981 at the age of 43. According to Donald Trump, Fred advised him to never drink, and the president has repeatedly expressed his distaste for alcohol and drinking.

    Following the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings to examine the sexual assault accusation against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Trump expressed that he did not share Kavanaugh’s passion for beer.

    “I don’t drink beer,” Trump told reporters. “I’ve never had a beer. And I’m not saying good or bad, some people like it. I just choose not to do that for a lot of reasons.”

    An individual “close to the White House” also told The Washington Post that the president “doesn’t like drinkers.” Tony Schwartz, co-author of Trump’s memoir The Art of the Deal, has said that the main reason the president avoids alcohol is a fear of losing control.

    “One of the primary reasons I think Trump avoided alcohol was that he never wanted to be out of control,” said Schwartz. “It made him feel weak and vulnerable in any circumstance where he felt that was the risk.”

    Alcohol is known to lower inhibitions when consumed to intoxication.

    On the other hand, Tim O’Brien, author of TrumpNation, believed that Fred Trump’s alcoholism and early death had a significant effect on the president and his aversion to drinking.

    “I think he’s scared of the effects alcohol can have on people because he witnessed firsthand how it destroyed his brother’s life, and I think he’s a teetotaler because he’s scared of it in himself,” said O’Brien. 

    “I think Freddy’s journey sparks fear in the president, and it’s a tragedy in their family’s history, and both of those things make him very uncomfortable around people with a drinking problem.”

    According to the NIAAA, 15.1 million adults in the U.S. had alcohol use disorder in 2015, and there are 88,000 alcohol-related deaths yearly. Alcohol use and misuse is one of the leading causes of preventable death.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Kevin Zegers Defends Decision To Tell His Young Kids About Alcoholism

    Kevin Zegers Defends Decision To Tell His Young Kids About Alcoholism

    After posting a video where his three-year-old twins call him an alcoholic, Kevin Zegers later explained his decision to inform them about his condition.

    Kevin Zegers won praise for his response to online uproar about a post on his Instagram page in which his young children described their father as an “alcoholic.” Zegers, 34, an award-winning actor whose credits include Transamerica, Fear the Walking Dead and most recently, Dirty John, is currently in recovery for alcohol dependency, which in his response, he described as “part of his life.”

    He defended his decision to inform his children about his condition as an effort teach the girls “some empathy and understanding about addiction,” and chose to share the video as a means of “crack[ing] the window open so others can see what’s possible on the other side.”

    In the video, posted on January 22, 2019, Zegers’ wife, talent agent Jamie Feld, is heard asking the couple’s twin three-year-old daughters, “What is Daddy?” Both answer, “An alcoholic.” She then asks them where Zegers is at that moment, and then tells them that he is at an Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meeting. Zegers himself added the caption, “Learning ’em young. #aameeting.”  

    While response from some of Zegers’ followers was positive, others considered the couple’s transparency as giving the children information that may beyond their understanding.

    On January 23, 2019, Zegers himself posted a response to the latter followers, which began simply with “Being in recovery is a part of my life. Being an ‘alcoholic” doesn’t mean that I drink.”

    Zegers went on to explain that his decision to inform his daughters about his condition was inspired by their own questions about where he was at their bedtime. “Instead of lying to them, or projecting an archaic stigma, we choose to tell them the truth. ‘Daddy’s at a meeting,’” he wrote.

    In addition to imparting “empathy and understanding” about addiction on his children, Zegers also hoped that they would come to understand that inspite of his dependency, he has “chosen to live a clean and sober life that involves much more than drinking” for the past eight years.

    He also noted that his decision to make the video public was an attempt to directly address people like those who posted negative or questioning comments, whom he described as “want[ing] to share people with addiction and mental health issues back into the shadows. My choice is to crack the window open so others can see what’s possible on the other side.”

    Zegers has been frank about his alcohol dependency in the past. In a 2013 interview for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Zegers said that while he never drank while working on a film or television show, he did find that his career had leveled off after the critical success of Transamerica in 2006 because he either refused or “messed up, either intentionally or unintentionally” film projects that followed because of his struggles with alcohol. “But once I actually got sober, things started falling back into the order they were before,” he noted.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Josh Brolin Shares Drunk Photo To Celebrate Sobriety

    Josh Brolin Shares Drunk Photo To Celebrate Sobriety

    The Avengers actor described a harrowing, alcohol-fueled night on Instagram to celebrate a major sober milestone.

    Actor Josh Brolin, who has starred in movies ranging from The Goonies to No Country for Old Men to Deadpool 2, took to Instagram this week to celebrate five years of sobriety in an unusual way: sharing a photo from a drunk night out. 

    Brolin posted the photo, along with a lengthy caption. 

    “Drunk: when you think you’re having a rip roaring time and the next morning you wake up and your brain has broken into a frenzied beehive and your body is shattered shards of sharp glass desperately searching for what fits where and your spirit is being eaten by worms with great white bloodied teeth and your heart has shriveled into a black prune churning your intestines to the point where dysentery feels attractive,” he wrote.

    Brolin continued, “And you can’t remember anything you did so you roll out of bed over last night’s urine and you dial your best friend’s phone number because you recall him lifting you over his head, your whole self, before you hit and broke through the drywall and, you think, a large aquarium and the phone on the other end rings and he picks it up, that clambering for a phone, the clumsiness of a hardline, and you say: ‘What did I do last night?!’ and he answers, after a great pause: ‘…Dude…’. #5years.” 

    Brolin quit drinking and smoking five years ago. He had just had enough, he told The New York Times last summer. 

    “There’s something that happens to me when I drink that all moral code disappears,” he said. “So it’s like if I were to take that drink . . . after about halfway through, I would start thinking about jumping out that window . . . not to kill myself, but just because there must be somebody down there to catch me, and I wonder if I can pull it off or if I could land on that van. It just seemed like fun.”

    Despite the fact that he is more in control now that he is sober, he still tries to channel some of the spontaneity and levity that drinking brought to him, he said. 

    “I want to live more drunk. I want to live drunkenly. I just don’t want to take the drink.”

    Brolin told the Times that in recovery he’s also trying to overcome the codependent patterns in his love life. His past relationships, he said, had an unhealthy focus, which he described: “I’m going to find out all your needs and all your insecurities, and all that, and then I’m going to play on that. Like, you need a daddy? I’ll be your daddy. I’ll be your hero.”

    His dynamic with his current wife, Kathryn, is much healthier, he said. 

    “She doesn’t need me. She never needed me.”

    View the original article at thefix.com