Celebrities Addiction and Opioid Dependence

Drug dependency can feel like an impossible challenge—and it’s a challenge that indeed doesn’t discriminate. Opioid addiction affects people at all points on the socioeconomic scale, from the smallest and most impoverished communities to the most well-off.

It’s not hard to imagine how a financially affluent background affords a person better resources to treat opioid use disorder treatment. But an economic advantage doesn’t necessarily mean a person will be more successful with their recovery. The current standards of opioid use disorder treatment aren’t as effective as many people would hope.

 

Addiction in Hollywood

To get a better idea about the scope of the global opioid use disorder crisis—one that directly impacted 40.5 million people worldwide in 2017 and led to approximately 109,500 deaths—consider celebrity news. We frequently hear about actors, athletes, and other well-known personalities who share their experience with opioid use disorder.

Celebrities with History of Addiction

• Rapper and music producer Timbaland: he overcame an addiction to OxyContin and Percocet that started with a prescription for opioids following a root canal; his dependency accelerated after a divorce and investigation from the IRS.
• Actress Jamie Lee Curtis: now sober for over two decades, Curtis was dependent on Vicodin after first receiving a prescription for the drug following a cosmetic procedure which she said in an interview with Variety “wasn’t really painful.”
• Actor Matthew Perry: the former Friends star, publicly struggled with Vicodin and methadone dependency for years that had his weight yo-yo-ing up and down, among other challenges.
• Robert Downey Jr. had several arrests between the late 1990s and early 2000s while abusing alcohol, cocaine, and heroin. He spent time quite a bit of time in prison and then a rehab facility. Fortunately, Robert has turned his life around and has been a true example of recovery.
• Demi Lovato’s singing career took off, and so as her problems with drugs and alcohol. Demi has addressed her ongoing addiction, recovery, and mental health issues in interviews and social media.
• Ben Affleck has referred to his addiction issues as “a lifelong and difficult struggle.” Ben revealed in a recent interview that alcohol addiction is highly prevalent in Hollywood. He called it “the most ordinary thing.”

Those Lost to Overdose

Many more celebrities, including actors Heath Ledger and Corey Monteith (from the TV show Glee) and singer Prince, also struggled with opioid use disorder—but sadly lost their lives in the battle. But despite all their differences, these celebrities—like anyone else living with drug dependency—share many things in common, including a history of multiple failed attempts at rehab and recovery.

Failed detox attempt does not suggest a moral “failure” of the celebrities, nor anyone else who’s been in and out of drug treatment programs before. Instead, it’s meant to highlight some critical questions that aren’t adequately addressed in the fight against opioids.

Why is the failure of opioid use disorder treatment so familiar – even among individuals who are blessed with plenty of financial resources to help them? Why do so many people leave intensive rehab only to, eventually, use again and place themselves at dire risk of accidental overdose and death? After all, if drug dependency were indeed a “chronic disease,” like many people argue, wouldn’t medical treatment be sufficient to address the issue?

 

Addiction Treatment

The current standards of care often fail to provide effective and long-lasting solutions for individuals and their loved ones. Time and again, conventional opioid use disorder treatment falls short.

To be clear, there is undoubtedly a need for promoting prescriber responsibility, patient education, and the closer regulation of opioid manufacturing and distribution—all of which are the current methods du jour for ending the opioid crisis. And going beyond prevention, there is also a need to support individuals who are already in the grips of dependency (which sometimes includes medication-assisted interventions). But the state of the opioid crisis suggests that conventional treatment approaches do not sufficiently identify nor treat the more profound issues which all too often drive drug dependency: mental health challenges.

Put: chronic stress, emotional trauma, pervasive loneliness, and psychiatric disorders like depression and anxiety are common in the human experience and shared among people with opioid use disorder. And when these mental health issues are not explored and professionally managed, drug use disorders will persist.

 

Opioids- The Celebrities Drug of Choice

Opioid misuse is not a moral inadequacy or character flaw. In our experience and after treating thousands of individuals for more than two decades, we have found that opioid misuse is often an attempt to self-medicate to relieve physical and psychological pain.

Seen this way, drug misuse is a symptom of a deeper-rooted and highly personal issue. And, as you can imagine, interventions that only attempt to fix the symptom will not help a person resolve the underlying source of their problem, especially when the standard intervention merely replaces an illicit opioid with a legally prescribed one such as methadone or buprenorphine.

 

Where Do Celebrities Get Confidential Drug Treatment?

Treatment for Opioid Dependence

We need to start seeing opioid drug dependency for what it is. Drug addiction is not a “chronic disease,” but a complex behavioral response that often attempts to compensate for underlying physical and psychological pain and trauma. It is time to understand that conventional treatment for drug dependency often fails to address the true roots of opioid dependence adequately. It’s time to stop treating opioid use disorder in a vacuum that doesn’t consider the person behind the patient.

It is time to understand that finding a solution to the opioid crisis must include investigating and addressing a person’s mental health.

“Based on decades of scientific literature, and direct clinical experience, the team at Waismann Method® believes that until and unless mental health care is dealt with in a powerful, scientific, and all-encompassing manner, the opioid crisis will just lead to another drug crisis,” says Clare Waismann, CATC – Certified Addiction Treatment Counselor and the Founder of the Waismann Method® of Advanced Treatment of Opiate Dependence and Domus Retreat.

In other words, replacing illicit street drugs with government-subsidized medications only puts a bandage on our collective suffering. It leaves people at risk for self-medicating in the future with different substances. Conventional opioid use disorder treatment hasn’t proven to be enough to heal what’s going on beneath a person’s behaviors. Any treatment approach that prioritizes medication over psychological support is bound to be underwhelming.

 

Waismann Method Opioid Treatment Specialists

With the Waismann Method®, our experienced team gets people medically detoxified from opioids in a private, comfortable, state-of-the-art hospital environment under the direct supervision of a quadruple-board certified physician. Rapid detox – the medical treatment of opioid use disorder and other forms of medically assisted detox, helps patients quickly and safely get the opioid drugs out of their system. This allows them to be more emotionally and physically prepared to do the following and usually hardest step of their recovery: addressing the underlying mental and emotional issues driving their drug use in the first place.

At Waismann, we provide personalized, private, and comprehensive physical and emotional health care to help you or your loved one find the best path to a complete recovery. Our private treatment center for Substance Abuse and Opioid Use Disorder, Domus Retreat®, provides you with around-the-clock care from healthcare professionals. At the same time, you recover from your detox treatment in a place where you genuinely feel cared for, comfortable, and indeed supported.