Profiles Of Addiction Recovery | Russell Brand

While Russell Brand may be best known as a movie star, given his memorable role in the 2008 comedy film Forgetting Sarah Marshall, the British entertainer, activist, and former husband of pop singer Katy Perry is also an outspoken figure on the subject of substance use disorders and recovery.

Addiction recovery is a subject Brand is intimately familiar, given his own experience with chronic alcohol and heroin addiction in his younger years.

Experimentation & Addiction

While many celebrities end up dabbling with drug use to cope with the pressure and expectations of fame, Russell Brand’s experience with substance use disorder began well before his stardom began.

Brand’s mother was diagnosed with cancer and used recreational drugs, including LSD, while he was growing up. Brand, in turn, struggled with severe mental health challenges and disorders during his teenage years, including binge eating, bulimia, depression, and self-harm.

In the midst of his adolescent psychological pain and distress, Brand has described substance abuse, and his first-time using heroin in particular, as a beautiful sanctuary and escape from his pain. 

Structure & Recovery

Brand has reiterated numerous times that he sees neither alcohol nor heroin experimentation as the real cause of his drug addiction. They were symptoms and flawed solutions to his own loneliness, pain, and disconnection from the world. 

Brand would abuse alcohol and heroin for eleven years until 2003, when the 27-year-old comedian enrolled in an addiction treatment program and began a recovery that continues in 2023, 20 years of sobriety later.

Brand has also described the reality of drug addiction as fundamentally irrational and out of a person’s control, unless recovering addicts receive the right form of help and support. 

According to Brand, the right form of help and support are support groups, 12-step programs, fellowships, and professional treatment organizations.

Higher Powers

Brand’s activism has led him to speak and write extensively on addiction issues, including the publication of a 2017 book titled Recovery: Freedom From Our Addictions. 

While the book sets out to share all the lessons Brand has learned about addiction and recovery during his long years of abstinence, he readily points out that he is only qualified to write on the subject not because he is better than the reader, but because he is worse.

In Recovery, Brand, who is not religious, devotes a great deal of page space to the idea of a Higher Power as enshrined in the 12-steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. 

While he passionately endorses that everyone, even those who do not struggle with alcohol or drug addiction, move forward in recovery and in life with a higher power, he rejects the idea that anyone needs to define it fully.

To Brand, a person’s Higher Power is a tool to bring them back to self-compassion and oneness with others, to open up the narrow perspective addiction forces on those who struggle with it, and to break the addictive instinct to place one’s own pleasure and distraction first.

Recovery Is Possible

If you’re ready to connect with compassionate healthcare providers and begin building a lasting recovery from drug abuse and dependency, we can help. To learn more, please contact Ark Behavioral Health today.