The industry makes it harder for them to recover by coddling talent so they keep working. Everyone wants the next cut of a check, everyone wants the project to succeed.
On February 27,Conscious Recovery by CLARE hosted a panel discussion entitled, “State Of Addiction: Hollywood” in Santa Monica. Mirroring the rest of the country, the state of addiction in Hollywood is grim. Given the passion of the panel participants for the subject, the conclusions presented during the discussion were both hopeful and brutally realistic.
Moderated by Hollywood Reporter journalist Chris Gardner and held at the Conscious Recovery treatment facility in Santa Monica, the panelists also included True Blood star Stephen Moyer, MusiCares director Harold Owens, Actor’s Fund Employee Assistance Director Dae Medman, former William Morris Agency talent department co-head Brian Gersh, Sober Coach Kevin McLaughlin, and Jennifer Musselman, a former Nickelodeon executive who shifted careers to become a Senior Director of Strategy for the CLARE Foundation and oversees the program treatment services at Conscious Recovery.
In an interview right before the start of the event, Dae Medman helped to frame the challenge of the overall problem of addiction in Hollywood. As the EA Director of the Actor’s Fund and the former director of the Entertainment Industry Referral & Assistance Center, Dae Medman has worked on the front lines. She has seen many talented people ripped apart by alcoholism and addiction, desperate for help in the face of an uncaring industry town of tinsel and glitter.
Describing what she experienced in her solo interview with The Fix, Medman explained the challenges in-depth:
“There’s a major addiction problem throughout the country. Hollywood is a microcosm of that macrocosm, but the backbone of the industry has always been the creatives. The personality types of such people seem to have a propensity to abuse substances. The pressure to succeed, an underlying need for money and a diet of constant rejection exacerbates the problem. Read more “the fix”…