Tag: david konow

  • Lady Gaga’s Mother Discusses Singer’s Childhood Mental Health

    Lady Gaga’s Mother Discusses Singer’s Childhood Mental Health

    “What I didn’t realize because I wasn’t prepared, was how to really deal with it. When I was growing up, times were different.”

    With her incredible success, Lady Gaga has used her powerful platform to speak out about mental health with her Born This Way Foundation.

    Now, her mother, Cynthia Germanotta, spoke with CBS This Morning about how parents can deal with children that are struggling with their mental health. 

    Throughout her life, Lady Gaga, born Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, has struggled with depression, anxiety and PTSD.

    “As a parent, I wasn’t prepared to really address this,” Cynthia explains. “Stefani was very unique, and that wasn’t always appreciated by her peers, and as a result, she went through a lot of difficult times – humiliated, taunted, isolated.”

    My Generation Was Told To Suck It Up

    Upon entering middle school, Germanotta saw her daughter go from “a very happy and aspirational young girl to somebody that started to question her self-worth, to have doubts about herself. What I didn’t realize because I wasn’t prepared, was how to really deal with it. When I was growing up, times were different. The way that we would deal with things was what we learned. I relied on the generational grit of just sucking it up and getting on with it.”

    Once she saw her daughter clearly struggling, Cynthia says, “It’s very hard to know what to do. The profound impact that it can have (on families). It basically turns the focus of everything onto that one individual. Families feel conflicted about it, they don’t really understand it, it causes conflict, and a lot of stress within the families. It can also cause feelings of guilt and helplessness, not knowing how to help my daughter. What I’ve learned is that no family is immune to this.”

    Parents: Listen To Your Children, Share Your Own Struggles

    For families that are struggling with troubled teens, Germanotta recommended that parents simply listen.  

    “What I learned from my daughter is to listen and validate her feelings. I think as parents our natural instinct is to go into problem-solving mode, when in fact they really just want us to take them seriously and understand what they’re saying.” 

    While a lot of troubled youth don’t feel comfortable talking to their parents about their struggles out of “fear of being judged,” Germanotta adds that “as parents we don’t talk about our own struggles. I encourage parents to be vulnerable. Talk about your current and past struggles. The biggest thing is to talk to them.” 

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Tim McGraw Says Faith Hill's Ultimatum Helped Him Get Sober

    Tim McGraw Says Faith Hill's Ultimatum Helped Him Get Sober

    The country superstar has been sober for 11 years. 

    In a new book hitting stores next month, Country legend Tim McGraw details the moment his wife, Faith Hill, gave him a life-changing ultimatum: keep her or the booze, but not both.

    McGraw’s book is a wellness guide called Grit & Grace: Train the Mind, Train the Body, Own Your Life. In it, the singer recalls being in bad shape after losing three important people in his life: his father, his stepfather, and a mentor he had in high school.

    As Radar reports, McGraw said it was the “darkest period” of his life, and alcohol was his “crutch” to try and get him through.

    “I drank more to dull the discomfort,” he explained.

    Sober Up Or You’re Gonna Lose Everything

    But then Hill laid down the law. “Getting real like only she can do, Faith told me, ‘Partying or family, take your pick.’” McGraw knew there was “no question” what he was going to choose, and it wasn’t long before he sobered up. 

    As McGraw told Men’s Health, “I partied too much. And did other things too much. Chemically. No needles or that kind of stuff, but…use your imagination. When your wife tells you it’s gone too far, that’s a big wake-up call. That, and realizing you’re gonna lose everything you have. Not monetarily, not career-wise, but family-wise.”

    Time To Change

    McGraw has now been sober for over a decade, and he credits exercise for keeping him clean and sober. He told People, “I felt like I had to change my life. And it wasn’t like I was out doing crazy things, it was just that I was drinking too much. Some people might look at it and say – hey, I drank twice as much as that. But it adversely affected my life and it was time to change it. The ritual now is to run. Me and a few of the guys in the band we take off and run for 4 or 5 miles. It is literally timed so I ran straight into the dressing room, get ready and hit the stage.” 

    McGraw and Hill also just celebrated their 23rd wedding anniversary on October 7, proving that McGraw definitely made the right choice in getting sober 11 years ago.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Kanye West Talks Porn & Sex Addiction

    Kanye West Talks Porn & Sex Addiction

    The Grammy winner has openly spoken about mental health, including publicly disclosing that he’s bipolar.

    Kanye West is back with his latest album, Jesus is King, and on the eve of its release, he candidly spoke with Beats 1 about being addicted to porn and sex.

    West started with a ritual many young boys go through, finding an issue of his dad’s Playboy, which he called a “gateway to a full on pornography addiction. It has impacted every choice I have made in my life from age five to now, having to kick the habit. And it just presents itself in the open like it’s okay and I stand up and say, ‘No, it’s not okay.’” 

    Drowning Himself In Sex — A Rock Star Cliché

    West saw himself living a cliché that many musicians fall into.

    “That was such a script out of a rock star’s life. You know that Playboy that I found when I was five years old was written all over the moment when I was at the MTV awards with the Timberlands, the Balmain jeans and the Hennessy bottle. My mom had passed a year before. And I said some people drown themselves in drugs, and I drown myself in sex.”

    West said that sex “fed the ego too. Money, clothes, paparazzi photos, going to Paris fashion week, all of that.” 

    Asking Employees To Abstain From Premarital Sex

    Coming to his realization about porn and sex addiction also affected how he crafted the Jesus is King album. “I was asking people to…this is gonna be radical what I’m about to say. There were times where I was asking people to not have premarital sex while they were working.” 

    West has openly spoken about his mental health issues, including publicly disclosing that he’s bipolar (he subsequently claimed he was misdiagnosed), and he’s used it as material for his lyrics as well.

    On the cover of his album Ye, “I hate being bipolar it’s awesome” is scrawled in neon green. And as he told radio personality Big Boy, “I am so blessed and so privileged because think about people that have issues that are not Kanye West, that can’t go and make that [music] and make you feel like it’s all good. I’d never been diagnosed and I was like 39 years old. That’s why I said on the album it’s not a disability, it’s a super power.” 

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Liam Payne Drank Heavily To Deal With One Direction Fame

    Liam Payne Drank Heavily To Deal With One Direction Fame

    “I used to get off stage, high off the endorphins and get horrendously drunk, get up at five in the afternoon and do it all again.”

    One Direction, the wildly popular boy band from the UK, first gained fame from performing on The X Factor in 2010. They then scored their first number one single a year later. Years of fame and success followed, but as former 1D member Liam Payne recalls, the sudden rise to pop stardom “nearly killed” him before he cleaned up his act.

    As Payne explained on Table Manners with Jessie Ware podcast, “I went through a stage in the band when I was drinking really heavily—I put weight on and didn’t notice,” to the point where he was called the “fat one” in One Direction.

    “I was just really drunk every day… I used to just get wasted and say whatever I wanted. Our schedule time was just a mess, I used to get off stage, high off the endorphins and get horrendously drunk, get up at five in the afternoon and do it all again.”

    Reality Check

    The singer added, “I didn’t see what was looking back at me in the mirror.” It wasn’t until he saw an unflattering paparazzi picture of himself that he decided he needed to get help.

    “I was surprised I’d become that guy,” he says. “It was worth it to make me realize what life’s made of.”

    Payne ultimately realized, “You’re either gonna end up a crazy child star who dies at whatever age or you’re gonna live, laugh and actually get on with it properly.”

    It’s been hard for Payne to adjust to life post-stardom, but he says, “I needed to stop, definitely. It would have killed me. One hundred percent. I literally spent the last two years of this, in and out of doing the music, trying to learn to be a person, if that makes sense.”

    Life After One Direction

    In recent years, Payne has talked openly about his mental health struggles as a famous pop star. It was hard to hit the stage for hundreds of concerts when he didn’t feel good, and as he told Men’s Health Australia, “It’s almost like putting the Disney costume on before you step up on stage. I was pissed (drunk) quite a lot of the time because there was no other way to get your head around what was going on.”

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • "Drugstore Cowboy" Turns 30: Revisiting The Classic Addiction Film

    "Drugstore Cowboy" Turns 30: Revisiting The Classic Addiction Film

    The classic film offers viewers a glimpse into the world of addiction without cheap clichés and stereotypes.

    Drugstore Cowboy, the acclaimed film directed by Gus Van Sant, has just hit its 30-year anniversary. Three decades after its release, The Guardian makes the case that it could possibly be the best movie made about addiction.

    Based On A True Story

    Cowboy was based on the memoir by James Fogle.

    As Van Sant told Indie Wire, “Fogle had spent most of his time in prison growing up. He had written a few different novels. This was one of them. This material was written in the ‘60s and it always had a very pulp-fiction feeling…”

    Cowboy follows Matt Dillon and his cohort of drug-using pals, played by James LeGros, Kelly Lynch and Heather Graham, as they rob drugstores along the Pacific Northwest. The film really captures the many nuances and subtleties of active addiction, writes the Guardian‘s Scott Tobias.

    All You Gotta Do Is Look At The Labels

    In the film, Dillon says, “Most people don’t know how they’re going to feel from one minute to the next. But a dope fiend has a pretty good idea. All you gotta do is look at the labels on the little bottles.”

    As Tobias writes, “Drugstore Cowboy could be a companion piece to Midnight Cowboy from 20 years earlier, in that both are about modern outlaws living hand-to-mouth in urban squalor, running short-term scams into long-term trouble. Only Van Sant’s film has a funny, offbeat, episodic quality that doesn’t negate the heartbreak and tragedy that’s peppered throughout it, but gives it dimension and surprising verve.”

    Another critic called Cowboy “a breakthrough portrait of addiction… The film is casually idiosyncratic, shifting from absurdist comedy to downbeat drama, and back again. It’s a fitting style for characters whose lives veer from ecstasy to dread, depending on whether the next fix is in hand.”

    At the height of anti-drug hysteria in the ’80s, Cowboy was also a refreshingly non-judgmental movie that showed addiction without the use of cheap clichés and stereotypes.

    An Anti-Drug Film

    In a behind-the-scenes documentary on Cowboy, Van Sant said, “I think it’s an anti-drug film, yeah. It’s not a pro-drug film. It’s a story about a group of people that are addicted very heavily to drugs and something that happens to them.”

    The film’s producer, Cary Brokaw, added, “It allows the audience to see the attraction of drugs, and to understand intimately what that lifestyle, that high, that surge, that charge means. But it also allows the audience to see the consequences firsthand and to see the destruction and the loss.”

    Fogle would die in prison in 2012 while serving a 16-year sentence for robbing a pharmacy. He was 75.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Ivan Moody Reflects On Addiction Through His Tattoos

    Ivan Moody Reflects On Addiction Through His Tattoos

    The Five Finger Death Punch singer got candid about the connections between his tattoos and his journey to sobriety.  

    Ivan Moody, the lead singer of Five Finger Death Punch, has had a very tough road out of addiction, and recently he spoke to the metal site Loudwire for a show called “The Needle and The Damage Done.”

    It’s a show about tattoos, but the title, in reference to a Neil Young song about heroin, is also fitting considering his dark past.

    In showing his tattoos, Moody has a phoenix drawn onto his head which represents his one-year sobriety milestone.

    “I wanted to not only wake up everyday and remind myself of how far I’ve come, but how far I have to go,” he says. “I wanted to make sure that everybody knew that I wasn’t going anywhere. This is not only a symbol of my strength, but also, hopefully, a symbol that other people can look at, and know they’re not alone.”

    Declared Legally Dead For 2 Minutes

    Moody also has a snake tattoo, symbolizing shedding skin after coming out of a medically induced coma, During his coma, Moody was declared legally dead for two minutes, and when he woke up, he needed help walking to the mirror. He took a hard glance and didn’t recognize the person staring back at him.

    “It was like [Lord of the Rings character] Gollum. I was green and ugly and pale and like, ‘What the fuck happened to me?’ And that’s when I decided I was going to shed skin and be the man that I’ve always been and I can be.”

    Moody adds, “The biggest part for me, especially in sobriety, yes it’s the band, yes it was for my kids, yes it’s for my family, but at the beginning of the day, it starts with me.”

    Under his eye, Moody has the spears of destiny symbol, which is out of the Bible, and he also turned a teardrop tattoo into a flame, “as a sign of the future. I wanted to do everything I could to not forget who I am, but move past it.”

    This past March, Moody hit his one-year sober milestone, and as he said in an Instagram video, “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.”

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Tallulah Willis Discusses Mental Health, Suicidal Thoughts

    Tallulah Willis Discusses Mental Health, Suicidal Thoughts

    The 25-year-old used Instagram to bring attention to smiling depression.

    Demi Moore’s long-awaited autobiography, Inside Out, has been making headlines for her confessions about her past drug abuse, and the mental health issues she dealt with growing up in a dysfunctional family. Now her daughter, Tallulah Willis, is speaking out on Instagram about her own mental health issues as well.

    Back in December 2018, Willis posted a video of herself dancing in a pink bikini, seemingly happy and carefree. Now she writes, “We are not what we show. When I filmed this video I remember everyone telling me over and over how they wished they had my energy, my freeness, a ownership of self.”

    High-Functioning Depression

    Yet nothing could have been further from the truth. “When this video was filmed I was three months into the deepest suicidal hole I had ever been in.”

    Willis’s confession was timed to coincide with Mental Health Awareness Day, and she continued, “I’m not ready to share my story yet, but I’m with you…Pain is pain. It’s different and enters each of our lives through a myriad of ways, but each electric stab or dull ache is real. The kind of pain that you can’t see, the pain that lives in the space behind your throat. I’m scared of my brain, the capacity for pain it has and will continue to bear. My fight is daily and for the duration of my life and each day I chose to find the glowed moments, a thefted giggle, or true peaceful pause.”

    While Willis said she’s not ready to share her story, she has spoken out about her mental health issues before in the press. In 2015, she spoke about suffering from depression with Teen Vogue, explaining, “I haven’t felt OK with who I am since I was 11 years old.”

    Her Own Worst Critic

    Coming from a famous family, Willis eventually succumbed to the taunting from cyberbullies, and she “became my own worst critic.” Willis eventually developed an eating disorder and her weight plummeted to 95 pounds. Once her depression engulfed her in college, she went into a treatment center. “It’s not night and day,” she explains. “It’s not like now I completely love myself and have no problems. That isn’t how it works. But there are the starting points of that, and that’s really exciting.”

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Mike Ness From Social Distortion On 34 Years Of Sobriety

    Mike Ness From Social Distortion On 34 Years Of Sobriety

    “I hit an emotional bottom early on, and I’m grateful. I was lucky,” said the lead singer.

    Social Distortion, the LA-based punk band, have hit their 40-year anniversary, and lead singer/founder Mike Ness is lucky to be here to enjoy it.

    Ness had his battles with addiction and hardship as a young punk, tough experiences that he chronicled in his music, but he cleaned up his act when he was 23, and has been sober for 34 years.

    As Ness tells Altpress, he left home when he was a teenager, and was not on good terms with his parents for years. “I had to figure out everything again on my own,” he explains.

    “I got sober when I was 23, and I thought, As long as I’m sober, everything’s good. It wasn’t until almost 20 years into my marriage that I realized my upbringing and stuff that happened to me as a kid was affecting my behavior and relationships with the people immediately close to me – my wife and kids. So I had to really confront that.”

    17 & In The Throes Of Alcoholism

    Ness said by the time he was 17 years old, “I was in full-blown alcoholism, a really fucked-up kid, damaged. And I was really, really luck to have gotten pulled out of that. I could easily have just been a small paragraph in {punk fanzine] Flipside saying, ‘We lost him.’”

    Before Ness got sober, he spent a lot of time in jail. He was stealing and committing burglaries to support his habit, and he finally had to confront his difficult childhood.

    “I hit an emotional bottom early on, and I’m grateful,” he says today. “I was lucky. Here’s the thing: I was not successful with the band yet. I didn’t have handlers. I wasn’t shooting dope in the St. Regis or in the back of a limousine. But I’m grateful for that, because those people end up enabling you…I had nothing like that.”

    Ness said he “started at the bottom. And ended up even a little lower…you’re out on the streets of Santa Ana [California] and the dope man doesn’t even want you around because you’re such a pathetic mess…it’s a very lonely existence.”

    Looking Back On Past Mistakes

    As Ness is nearing his sixties, he tells writer DX Ferris, “I don’t know if I make fewer mistakes. They’re just different kinds of mistakes. I guess they’re adult mistakes…I still have plenty to write, because I’m still trying to figure out what it is to be a man and navigate through life.”

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Mike Ness From Social Distortion Talks Sobriety

    Mike Ness From Social Distortion Talks Sobriety

    “I hit an emotional bottom early on, and I’m grateful. I was lucky,” said the lead singer.

    Social Distortion, the LA-based punk band, have hit their 40-year anniversary, and lead singer/founder Mike Ness is lucky to be here to enjoy it.

    Ness had his battles with addiction and hardship as a young punk, tough experiences that he chronicled in his music, but he cleaned up his act when he was 23, and has been sober for 34 years.

    As Ness tells Altpress, he left home when he was a teenager, and was not on good terms with his parents for years. “I had to figure out everything again on my own,” he explains.

    “I got sober when I was 23, and I thought, As long as I’m sober, everything’s good. It wasn’t until almost 20 years into my marriage that I realized my upbringing and stuff that happened to me as a kid was affecting my behavior and relationships with the people immediately close to me – my wife and kids. So I had to really confront that.”

    17 & In The Throes Of Alcoholism

    Ness said by the time he was 17 years old, “I was in full-blown alcoholism, a really fucked-up kid, damaged. And I was really, really luck to have gotten pulled out of that. I could easily have just been a small paragraph in {punk fanzine] Flipside saying, ‘We lost him.’”

    Before Ness got sober, he spent a lot of time in jail. He was stealing and committing burglaries to support his habit, and he finally had to confront his difficult childhood.

    “I hit an emotional bottom early on, and I’m grateful,” he says today. “I was lucky. Here’s the thing: I was not successful with the band yet. I didn’t have handlers. I wasn’t shooting dope in the St. Regis or in the back of a limousine. But I’m grateful for that, because those people end up enabling you…I had nothing like that.”

    Ness said he “started at the bottom. And ended up even a little lower…you’re out on the streets of Santa Ana [California] and the dope man doesn’t even want you around because you’re such a pathetic mess…it’s a very lonely existence.”

    Looking Back On Past Mistakes

    As Ness is nearing his sixties, he tells writer DX Ferris, “I don’t know if I make fewer mistakes. They’re just different kinds of mistakes. I guess they’re adult mistakes…I still have plenty to write, because I’m still trying to figure out what it is to be a man and navigate through life.”

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Netflix's "The Politician" Criticized For Its Depiction Of Suicide

    Netflix's "The Politician" Criticized For Its Depiction Of Suicide

    Mental health advocates worry that the way the show handles suicide could lead to imitative behavior amongst the vulnerable.

    The new Netflix series, The Politician, is receiving backlash from mental health organizations because of how the show depicts suicide.

    The Politician, starring Ben Platt, is the latest series from Ryan Murphy (Glee, American Horror Story, Pose). Platt plays a high school kid who wants to become president of the United States one day, and his ambitions begin when he tries to become student body president. In the first episode, one of Platt’s political rivals takes his life.

    Trigger Warning

    The show includes a trigger warning, which reads: “The Politician is a comedy about moxie, ambition, and getting what you want at all costs. But for those who struggle with their mental health, some elements may be disturbing. Viewer discretion is advised.”

    Yet the Mental Health Foundation has openly criticized this warning to the media. Chris O’Sullivan, an executive at the UK-based Mental Health Foundation, told The Telegraph, “TV dramas naturally want to explore and sometimes to dramatize distress. Trigger warnings can be part of such programming but they should be sincere. They don’t provide a license to then show gratuitously distressing content, content that presents a stigmatizing view of distress or content that romanticizes suicide, shows details of methods, which can increase the risk of copycat behavior.”

    Concern Over Life Imitating Art

    Ged Flynn, an executive at the PAPYRUS anti-suicide charity, is also concerned about the show, feeling that its graphic depiction of suicide “can, and often does, lead to imitative behavior. People who produce such imagery must weigh up the consequences before putting their work before the public, particularly young people and those who may be vulnerable.”

    Digital Spy reports that Netflix consulted with the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention when the show was in production.

    The streaming service also came under fire for the depiction of suicide in the series 13 Reasons Why.

    In 2017, Netflix added a trigger warning at the beginning of 13 Reasons Why after the show received negative feedback from people who thought the show could cause a “contagion effect” and potentially inspire teens to take their lives.

    Netflix told BuzzFeed that they used the trigger warning “as an extra precaution for those about to start the series,” and that they also “strengthened the messaging” on their trigger warnings as well.

    View the original article at thefix.com