Said Matthew Perry, quoted in "Matthew Perry 'Nearly Died' When His Colon Burst Due to Opioid Addiction 'The doctors told my family that I had a 2 percent chance to live,' the Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing author says."
The other "Friends" actors were, he says, "like penguins. Penguins, in nature, when one is sick, or when one is very injured, the other penguins surround it and prop it up. They walk around it until that penguin can walk on its own. That's kind of what the cast did for me." That sounds like something a character on the show would say.
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The penguin comment is not necessarily complimentary. Is he saying that his co-workers enabled him?
Blogger Tom T. said...The penguin comment is not necessarily complimentary. Is he saying that his co-workers enabled him?
That was my first thought--enabling.
Was that the "fat Chandler" season?
Matthew Perry 'Nearly Died' When His Colon Burst Due to Opioid Addiction..."
"Colon Blow and you, in the morning."
"And guess which season I got nominated for best actor?"
It seems that Ray Romano won for Raymond that year, with Perry, Matt LeBlanc, Bernie Mac, and Kelsey Grammer the also rans. It seems LeBlanc was nominated three times, David Schwimmer once for supporting actor.
"I was like, ‘That should tell me something.'... I didn't know how to stop.... If the police came over to my house and said, 'If you drink tonight, we're going to take you to jail,' I'd start packing. I couldn't stop because the disease and the addiction is progressive. So it gets worse and worse as you grow older."
Jail certainly doesn't work to stop addiction.
Neither does enabling behavior.
It is interesting looking at how much dopamine different drugs cause your body to release relative to other drugs.
Crack and Nicotine release 2x as much dopamine as a successful sexual event. Opioids are 8-10x as much.
And he is wrong about the "progressing." You don't get more dopamine as it progresses, it takes more of the drug to get the same amount. You are still reaching for the same high.
I personally think people should be given a choice between successful rehabilitation and jail. There has to be a meaningful consequence and the best outcome is rehabilitation. This would end up in the most people getting successful treatment.
Then people would have to understand that relapse would land them in a long term halfway house.
People with serious addiction problems need to lose freedom to varying degrees. The worst thing you can do for a homeless drunk is give them 20$.
The first thing that needs to happen is people need to understand the nature of addiction.
Well...I think Achilles pretty much nails it.
Aiding and abetting never helps anybody.
"People with serious addiction problems need to lose freedom to varying degrees."
Careful. Althouse might say that YOU don't care.
Anyway, after decades of these post-addiction addiction stories, which are always the same story, why one more? What do we learn? What is the point?
We could Solve, ALL of these problems; if we just Legalize ALL DRUGS!
Because then.. There wouldn't be any problems, because drugs would be legal! You see? Do you?
My wife and I were in London in April 2016. After visiting Tower of London, we happened by the Playhouse Theatre and there was a giant picture of Perry above the marquee with an advertisement for his play, The End of Longing. On a lark, we bought tickets (they were reasonably priced, but included an expensive 2-drink minimum). He wrote and starred in the play. My wife and I very much enjoyed the play. I'm glad he's doing well.
Achilles said "The first thing that needs to happen is people need to understand the nature of addiction."
The book The biology of desire by Marc Lewis is a good place to start in my opinion.
It's hard for a sitcom star to achieve the kind of tragedy and Dionysian excess that rock stars attain with their addiction struggles. So far as I can recall, Bob Crane is the only sitcom star who has has his struggles memorialized with a biopic. By their very nature, sitcom stars lack gravitas.....I read somewhere that the Friends stars make multiple millions each year from the residuals. A guaranteed income of ten or twenty million per annum would give many people the strength to carry on and to vanquish their demons.
On "Friends," when one of the characters had a problem, the others would be nominally supportive, but also tease that person about it mercilessly. It was one of the reasons the show was so funny, but it was kind of mean compared to many other sitcoms.
An old statistic shows an addict negatively affects over seventy people, on average, through addicted behaviors.
>Perry also revealed that he has been to rehab 15 times over the years<
What a farce the rehab racket is! An annual vacation for a motley assortment of character-weak losers and personality disorders.
I was for a short time involved, as staff, in a big hospital-based drug/alcohol rehab facility. It was to a great extent a fantastical social event attended by pathetic dependent personalities most of whom were attending because of extraneous motivators (family, court, etc.) and having nothing whatsoever to do with any personal desire to clean up. Witnessing the group therapy circle jerks and watching these jokers parroting the obligatory catch-phrases and stock lines that they knew were expected of them to demonstrate "progress" was almost unbearable - as was the self-congratulation for their "courage" at the end of the program.
And then, back they came in a year or so. For many it was like old home week as they encountered druggies and boozers they had met other times and other programs. One of the first questions on the intake history form I had to fill out was: "How many times have you been in rehab?" It's like people who tell me, "This is the third time I've quit smoking." I always say to them, "I'm not sure you know the meaning of 'quit'."
Thanks for posting it. I have a friend in the midst of such struggles, and sent this book to him. Maybe it will get through.
"Jail certainly doesn't work to stop addiction."
Put a hundred addicts in county for a month. Physical addiction gone. Maybe ten or fifteen stay that way.
"What a farce the rehab racket is! An annual vacation for a motley assortment of character-weak losers and personality disorders."
Yeah, most rehab not like the celebrity joints, or the pretty ones out in the forest somewhere. Many rehab expose minor functional addict to serious junkies and criminals. Big money maker.
I put my money on jail, then Narcotics anonymous. Naturally, ya gotta want to stay clean. Might take a couple of tries to get with the program.
>Perry also revealed that he has been to rehab 15 times over the years<
He's bragging.Lots of Addicts and alcoholics play the "I was worse than you" game.
He said he was taking 55 Vicodin a day.
That's 16,500 milligrams of acetaminophen daily with 300 milligram acetaminophen Vicodin, unless he had the older ones with 500 milligrams and it would be 27,500 milligrams daily.
He's either lying, confused, or dead and speaking from the grave.
He has a new book out so I'm going with lying.
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