I Was An Addicted Doctor: Rehab Made Me Question How Much We Understand About Addiction

THE DOCTOR’S OPINION –

Feb. 8, 2022 – The next day, I meet with the whole treatment team – half a dozen psychiatrists, therapists and counsellors facing me across a massive table in one of those windowless hospital conference rooms. For the first time, I truly let my guard down and recount my whole drinking history. How I grew up with two alcoholic parents and swore to myself I’d never be like them. How, even as I finished medical school at Columbia, I had the creeping sense that my drinking was out of control. How the blackouts got more and more frequent, but I didn’t reach out for help, and I didn’t accept the help that friends, colleagues and supervisors had all offered, then implored me to take.

I tell them everything, even about the time I woke up on the floor of the hallway in my building, shirtless, my skin sticking to the tacky linoleum, locked out of my own apartment. It was only by getting up to the roof and climbing down the fire escape that I made it in to work that day at all. I was late again, and so ashamed and scared by what it said about me. It was obvious that something was wrong, but I never told anyone about it, because to do so would be to acknowledge what I had long suspected.