By David Palmer
Eighty percent of substance abuse problems like alcohol, pot, and prescription drugs are complicated by mental health problems such as depression, anxiety, bipolar disorders, and the like. In these “co-occurring” cases, both the addiction and mental health problems must be treated.
We don’t know all the details of Robin Williams’ suicide on Monday, but we do know that he was a drug addict and suffered from depression. We also know that he had been in treatment several times over the years and surely must have been exposed to treatment options for his depression as well as his drug abuse.
Perhaps in the end it was his uber celebrity, his drive to entertain that finally tipped him over.
A few years ago, onetime Hollywood producer/ director Gary Stromberg came to Little Rock, where I live, to promote his new book, “The Harder They Fall.” It includes the recovery stories of twenty celebrities he had interviewed. A celebrity himself, Gary has more than 30 years in recovery.
During the sixties and seventies, Gary toured the world with the likes of the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, the Doors, Three Dog Night, and others and shared their appetite for women and dope—mostly heroin, cocaine, pot, and alcohol.
His list of interviewees (some now deceased) includes Chuck Negron, lead singer of Three Dog Night; Grace Slick, lead singer of Jefferson Airplane and Jefferson Starship; Paul Williams, lyricist and composer; comedians Richard Pryor and Richard Lewis; jockey Pat Day; boxer Gerry Cooney; pitcher Dock Ellis; actors Mariette Hartley, Malcolm McDowell, and Malachy McCourt; and others.
In the front of Gary’s book, Lewis Lapham, noted author and former editor of Harper’s magazine, and Stephen Davis, a “best-selling chronicler of musical luminaries” (like Jim Morrison), offer comment on the subject at hand—addiction—and its victims.
Referring to his late friend Terry Southern (a drinker himself and writer of the screenplay for Dr. Strangelove), Lapham said, apropos of addiction, “I remember Terry saying to the assembled company at a table at Elaine’s, ‘There is no power on earth that can loosen a man’s grip on his own throat.’”
Gary, himself, can testify to that.
In 1974, for example, he handled the public relations for a music festival that preceded the historic Muhammad Ali-George Foreman African “Rumble in the Jungle” prizefight. As part of the gig, he traveled to Swaziland with Ali’s corner man, Drew “Bundini” Brown, where the two stumbled on a Merck Corp. factory, which was producing pharmaceutical cocaine.
“Talk about kids in a candy store,” Gary says.
Then there was his first movie. Fueled by two years of ever-increasing cocaine use, he produced a surprisingly successful picture called Car Wash with Richard Pryor. The money poured in.
After that came a spectacular flop, and it finally brought him down. It was a movie called The Fish that Saved Pittsburgh that was, in his words, “conceived and written in one rollicking night of gluttonous coke snorting.”
Bankrupt in every way, he went home.
“Virtually broke,” he said, “I moved back into the house I was raised in. A forty-year-old, failed big shot living with his parents.”
It took a few more years, but the happy ending finally came with a 12-Step meeting.
His wild ride, he reflects, “started out as great fun. For someone shy like me, drugs made me bigger and bolder. Eventually drugs and alcohol got the best of me. The fun became depravity…. I crashed and burned, but the will to survive took over. I was given the greatest gift I’d ever received. Sobriety. And with it came a new life.”
As for me, I sobered up in 1979 with Alcoholics Anonymous, was hospitalized briefly for depression 15 years later and began taking an antidepressant pill daily. Life is good.
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