Brad Pitt‘s admission that he’s consuming alcohol again after seven years sober and attending Alcoholics Anonymous for 18 months has set off some strong reactions within the recovery community.
The 62-year-old star revealed to Esquire that he’s “off the wagon,” but says he’s only drinking “in a more restrained manner,” claiming, “I can have a few [glasses of wine]. But I can’t have a lot. I have to be professional about it.”
The comments drew some skepticism online, including in recovery-minded forums like Reddit’s r/stopdrinking. “‘I can handle a few’ — same thing every alcoholic in the history of the world says when they relapse,” wrote one user. “If I could moderate I wouldn’t need to think about moderating,” noted another. “If you have a healthy relationship with alcohol, it is something you just do – no need to make rules and be disciplined.” Another wrote, “‘I have to be professional about it’ — oh honey, I’m four years sober and there’s no being ‘professional’ about addiction.”
But recovery experts who spoke to The Hollywood Reporter had a more nuanced take on the subject, essentially noting that not everybody who turns their life around needs to follow AA’s abstinence-based model.
Clinical social worker and policy advocate Joe Schrank — who has worked with addicts for more than 20 years and was a founding member of the first recovery program in a New York City public school — first agreed that Pitt’s comments about his moderate drinking should be viewed with some degree of skepticism.
“When he said he’s drinking moderately after seven years of abstinence, there’s a bunch of different things going on there,” he said. “Typically speaking, alcoholics are just a horrible source of information about themselves. Matthew Perry walked around reeking like booze telling people he was sober. But maybe [Pitt] is [drinking moderately]. The World Health Organization says that this is possible — that with moderate drinking, even after long periods of abstinence, there are lots of people who find success of clinical significance and life improvement. The AA morality police take this stuff as red meat for their need to finger wag and shame. Not everybody needs to spend the rest of their life totally abstinent with a cup of shitty coffee in a styrofoam cup regurgitating platitudes. Some do — I’m one of those people.”
Continued Schrank: “The truth is, for most people, their recovery is a living, breathing thing that is evolving over time and it’s a spectrum. He’s a big movie star and he’s been very successful in a tough business over many years. But are your children upset with you? That’s the kind of question I would pose to him.”
Keith Humphreys, a professor of psychiatry and an addiction researcher at Stanford University, similarly noted there are important unknowns when it comes to Pitt’s journey, but that he might fit the profile of somebody who is more likely to successfully transition from abstinence to modest amounts of drinking.
“Certainly if you talk to AA members. they would say [Pitt’s comments are] a delusion and it’s going to end in tears,” Humphreys said. “But it’s pretty clear from the evidence that people who are able to, after having a drinking problem, eventually get back to moderate drinking, tend to have a few things in common. One, they don’t have high dependency — and I don’t know how bad [Pitt’s] alcohol problems were that led to this seven year sobriety. Number two, they tend to have high social capital — educated, a job, somebody who loves them — which he does. And three, that they do not have serious psychiatric problems. Those are the predictors, with no guarantees either way. I wish him the best. There’s clearly some risk here, but it may be manageable depending on how he did on those other dimensions.”
Added Schrank: “I think that it’s important for people to understand that this is a common recovery story. Most people who have this problem ebb and flow out of various levels of improvement and safety. Recovery is not going to go in a straight line. I don’t think this deserves the moral panic it got and the freaking out is actually harmful to him. When you have diabetes or obesity and lose 50 pounds and then gain back 20, you don’t freak out. You say, ‘Okay, well, what are we going to do? Because you did pretty well for a long time and sustained change is really hard.’ So I hope he finds his way, whatever it is.”
That said, Schrank also pointed to the headlines we’ve all seen over the last few years. Evidence increasingly suggests alcohol is so toxic that no amount is truly risk free — regardless of whether somebody is an alcoholic or not. The World Health Organization announced this “no level is safe” conclusion three years ago, and since a review of the current literature in the medical journal Herz stated that when it comes to alcohol, “none is better than little.”