Answer Addiction

Tag: alcoholism

  • Jersey Shore's Ronnie Ortiz-Magro Breaks Silence On Rehab Stay

    Jersey Shore's Ronnie Ortiz-Magro Breaks Silence On Rehab Stay

    Ortiz-Magro said he decided to get help because to be a “better person, a better father for my daughter.”

    One of the original stars of Jersey Shore, Ronnie Ortiz-Magro, revealed his battles with depression and alcohol addiction in an interview with Us Weekly on Tuesday. The 33-year-old reality TV celebrity spoke on his recent decision to enter rehab, motivated by his desire to be a good role model for his daughter.

    “I decided to go to treatment because I wanted to be a better person, a better father for my daughter,” Otiz-Magro said. “Eventually, all the bad decisions I was making were going to lead me to places that I didn’t want to be. I wanted to be led to the place that I am now – that’s happy, healthy and the best role model for my daughter.”

    Ortiz-Magro has a little girl, Ariana Sky Magro, with his on-again-off-again girlfriend Jen Harley. Around the new year entering 2019, the couple had a violent fight that ended in a bloody face for Ortiz-Magro. Us Weekly reported that a source described their relationship as volatile.

    In the interview, the reality star admitted to not being proud of many of the things he’s done over the years, that he was making the wrong decisions, and was “very depressed.” Going into addiction treatment, he described himself as depressed, angry, and “resentful to myself about a lot of things I’ve done over the last year, or even years.”

    Like many individuals involved in the fast-paced life of stardom, Ortiz-Magro developed problems with drinking over a period of years and found himself feeling increasingly out of control.

    “I think it’s a chronic disease. It’s a progressive disease. I’m still struggling,” he explained. “You stop and you start up again, and it’s worse than when you stopped. You’re just like, ‘Wow, I thought I had this under control,’ but at the end of the day, it has full control over you.”

    Ortiz-Magro is not the only person involved in the Jersey Shore franchise to face addiction. Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino spoke in 2018 about the drug use that led to some of his reckless behavior. In season four, Sorrentino landed himself in the hospital after intentionally slamming his head into a concrete wall that he thought was drywall.

    “For a couple of years, from season two on to five, I was really pushing the envelope on my behavior,” Sorrentino told The Asbury Park Press of New Jersey. “I was very wild, very careless, reckless.”

    He checked himself into rehab in 2012 in order to get treatment for his addiction to oxycodone. He has since married his college sweetheart and appears to be doing well.

    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

  • Bam Margera Completes Court-Mandated AA, But Friends Are Worried

    Bam Margera Completes Court-Mandated AA, But Friends Are Worried

    The troubled skateboarder has completed treatment, but those who know him fear the worst could be ahead.

    Even after completing his court-mandated, three-month-long online alcohol program and attending AA meetings, Bam Margera’s friends are worried for his life.

    Margera’s colleague and Jackass co-star Brandon Novak told TMZ that he’s worried about Margera’s decision to leave rehab early. Novak, who is in recovery, expressed his disappointment in Margera leaving rehab, because he felt he would otherwise be killing him, saying, “enable an addict, bury an addict.”

    But Margera wasn’t satisfied with sitting in rehab, sharing these feelings in a journal entry he posted on social media.

    “Dear assholes who want to talk shit about my sobriety…” he began.

    He went on to explain that he left because the rehab facility did not seem to think that he needed any detox or medications, so he figured he was wasting his time. His lawyer also mentioned that Margera is ahead of his legal obligations in regards to his DUI.

    Margera was placed in rehab after getting a DUI in Los Angeles in January last year. At the time, he was already struggling with drinking.

    “I never had any pill problems and I’ve never tried heroin in my life, but it’s been a real struggle for me to stay off the alcohol,” he said in a 2017 interview. “But just as long as you’re surrounded by good people and you have something to do, you’ll be good.”

    He avoided jail time, opting for three years probation and mandatory alcohol programs as well as compulsory visits to Alcoholics Anonymous.

    Margera was managing to stay sober until late last year, when he posted a video of himself in distress and telling the story of the life-threatening robbery he had just experienced.

    “I just arrived in Cartagena alone and I took a taxi, a random one, from the airport to here and I wouldn’t speak Spanish, they couldn’t speak English, and they translated on their phone to read ‘empty your wallet’ as they put a gun on their lap to show it to me. So I did and I had 500 bucks,” he recounted in the video. “They let me go. Welcome to Colombia.”

    At the end, he cracked open a beer. Following the post, Steve-O publicly expressed his concern that Margera wasn’t even sober prior to the robbery. Steve-O himself, like Novak, is a now-sober Jackass alumnus.

    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

  • 15 Million Americans Are Battling Alcohol Use Disorder

    15 Million Americans Are Battling Alcohol Use Disorder

    Over an eight-year period, alcohol-related emergency room visits increased 47%.

    As a new year kicks off, some may be rethinking their relationship with alcohol. 

    In fact, according to the National Institutes of Health, greater than 15 million people in the US are living with alcohol use disorder.  

    The most recent numbers come from a study that examined data from 2006 to 2014 and found that alcohol-related emergency room visits increased to 5 million, up 47%. Of those, the biggest increase was in women ages 45 to 64. 

    One such woman is Teena Richardson of Seattle, who nearly lost her husband and two adult children due to her drinking habits. 

    “I wasn’t drinking wine anymore,” she told Fox 17. “It had escalated to hard alcohol. I wanted to get the buzz as fast as I could get it, and I wanted to hide it so that nobody knew.”



    Dr. Eric Shipley, medical director of Overlake Medical Center in Seattle, told Fox that despite these increasing numbers, people aren’t willing to cut out alcohol. 


    “If I went to somebody and said, ‘You could eliminate 15% of emergency room visits; would you do it?’ And they’d be, like, ‘Absolutely.’ Well, that means cutting out alcohol. ‘No, no, we’re not going there,” he said. 

    According to Fox 17, 88,000 people die each year of alcohol-related causes. This makes it the third leading preventable cause of death, with smoking and obesity coming in ahead.  

    “It’s one of the most dangerous drugs there is,” Dr. Harris Stratyner, a New York psychologist, told Fox 17. “It’s a little slower to kill you. It might take 10 years before it causes cirrhosis, but it’s gonna kill you.”

    For those who choose to seek treatment, there are a number of options for help. For Richardson, it took a few tries to find what worked. She tried outpatient therapy and 12-step programs before going to a 10-day aversion therapy program at Schick Shadel Hospital in Seattle. 


    Erick Davis, the medical director at Schick Shadel, said the goal is to take away the craving for alcohol. 

    “What we do is we pair the experience of nausea with the thought, smell, taste and sight of alcohol,” he told Fox.

    For Richardson, it worked, and she has been in recovery for seven years. 

    “Now I’m present, and I’m mindful of where I came from,” she told Fox. “And the test of alcoholism gave me a testimony. I’m on the other side of it.”

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Bam Margera Enters Rehab For The Third Time

    Bam Margera Enters Rehab For The Third Time

    Margaret’s last went to rehab in early 2018 after a DUI arrest in California.

    Former Jackass star Bam Margera is going to rehab for alcoholism again, just as he did this time last year after being arrested for a DUI. 

    “Off to alcohol rehab for the 3rd time. I am hoping the term 3rd time is a charm is true,” Margera wrote on his Instagram account on Tuesday (Jan. 1).

    Last year, Margera also went to rehab in January after he was arrested for DUI in California. He received three months of probation for the charge. In August, Margera explained what happened when he was arrested. 

    “Last fall, I attended a surprise Jackass reunion at the Rainbow Bar and Grill in Hollywood where, as you can imagine, the beers flowed all night,” he said. “Long story short, as I drove away from the party, not knowing where I was headed, I pulled over to try and figure it out. That’s when I noticed the police lights behind me. I was like, ‘Fuck, I’m pulled over.’ As it turned out, the police had actually pulled someone else over right behind me, and then came to my car to see why I was just sitting there. So yeah, I had the pleasure of getting a DUI that night that led to my being in a treatment center for a month.”

    After completing rehab Margera was reportedly sober for seven months until he was robbed in a taxi in Colombia. Margera recounted the incident in a video. 

    “I just arrived in Cartagena alone and I took a taxi, a random one, from the airport to here and I wouldn’t speak Spanish, they couldn’t speak English, and they translated on their phone to read ‘empty your wallet’ as they put a gun on their lap to show it to me. So I did and I had 500 bucks. They let me go. Welcome to Colombia.”

    At the end he’s seen cracking a beer. However, former colleague Steve-O said that he’s skeptical that Margera was sober until the robbery. 

    “I mean, I don’t know. And I don’t want him to [feel like] I’m attacking him or calling him out, I just think that there were signs that, if he hadn’t already drank, it was evident that he was going to,” Steve-O said. “The signs were there. I think if you’re a sober alcoholic that you kind of can tell.”

    Steve-O said there were signs that Margera wasn’t committed to a sober lifestyle. 

    “When people are on the path, sort of doing the things that sober people do, it’s evident,” he said. “It’s evident that he’s not been ready or willing to do the simple things that sober people do that make our lives really great. It’s sad, and I wish that I could somehow force him to want to do these things and get healthy and have a great life, but it doesn’t work that way. You can’t push people into it.”

    View the original article at thefix.com