“It was either get sober or lose my wife and kids, man, and that’s about the lowest rock bottom that I could possibly have gotten to,” Stapp said.
Scott Stapp, lead singer of the post-grunge band Creed, gave a lot of credit to his family for lifting him out of a period of substance abuse in a recent interview with Detroit radio station WRIF.
Stapp recently hit his five-year sobriety anniversary after years of struggling with alcohol and prescription drug addiction.
“My wife and my kids were critical in helping me get sober,” he told DJ Meltdown. “It got to the point where it was either get sober or lose my wife and kids, man, and that’s about the lowest rock bottom that I could possibly have gotten to. So they were critical.”
In addition to his family, the singer recently gave a shoutout to MusiCares, a non-profit established by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences that provides support to musicians who have fallen on hard times.
According to Stapp, MusiCares helped educated him and his wife on the nature of addiction, helping them understand that it’s a disease that requires ongoing treatment.
“I still have a lot of music ahead me and without MusiCares, that wouldn’t have been possible,” said Stapp. “They provided support and helped educate my wife and I on what we were going through, that it was a disease, and if I did my part, it could be treated and recovered from. Thanks to MusiCares and my family, I’m going on five years sober.”
Stapp also suffers from bipolar disorder, which went undiagnosed for years and may have fueled his addiction disorders. He has spoken out about multiple suicide attempts and near-attempts, including an incident in 2006 in which he jumped off of a balcony in Miami and fell 40 feet.
He survived after being discovered by rapper T.I. with a fractured skull and a broken nose and hip. Later that year, he admitted to Rolling Stone that he had been fighting addiction to Percocet, Xanax, and prednisone.
It wasn’t until 2015 that Stapp told People he had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder after suffering what he called a “psychotic break.”
“I had a psychotic break that was brought on by alcohol and drug abuse,” he says. “I was hallucinating. I drove around the United States for a month, following an angel that I saw on the hood of my car.”
During the WRIF interview, Stapp explained how his naiveté going into the world of music set him up for “going down that wrong path.”
“I just had so much in front of me, and being so naïve, walking into it, I just didn’t know how to handle it, and it got a hold of me,” he said. “And around the same time, I had my first onset of depression. And you combine that with self-medicating, with alcohol and whatever else you can find, and it’s a bad scenario, man.”
