Everyone knew about my years of addiction, the dangers I had put myself in. The second time around, after 11 years sober, not even my husband knew

I am finding it very hard to write about my return to drinking. This is unexpected, given that I spent more than 10 years identifying as an alcoholic and narrating, from the podiums of church basements, the most shameful and unflattering moments of my life. The story of how you initially fell into addiction is comparatively easy to tell, because it’s widely understood that nobody chooses to become an addict, that it’s something that sneaks up on you and takes hold gradually, usually when you are too young to know better, and that quitting is an uphill battle against denial and the difficult work of coming to admit to yourself that there is a problem.

It’s much harder to tell the story of how you convinced yourself to return to a habit that you had already pushed to its limit, a habit from which you’d been free for more than a decade.

Carr was a member of the group in his teens and 20s. There is no evidence Trump’s powerful FCC chair participated in any inappropriate conduct

Brendan Carr, the chair of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), was for about a decade a member of a rogue Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) group when he was in his late teens and 20s that some former members compared to a “cult”, according to a Guardian investigation.

The Midtown group, which was based in the Washington DC area, attracted young people who were seeking help with addiction, sometimes at the urging of their parents.

Decades after being sexually abused, the author and doctor Frank Spinelli believed he had moved on emotionally. But alcohol destroyed his sense of security. He describes how he confronted his shame

Not so long ago, Frank Spinelli seemed to have sorted out his life. He was happily married, working as a doctor and had a sideline writing medical thrillers. He thought he had dealt with the sexual abuse he had suffered as a child – not only had he helped bring the man who groomed and abused him to justice, but also he had written a memoir about it. “I felt that I had closure,” he says. “I had the good fortune of working with some amazing therapists and I believed I had done the work and moved past it and I was a healed person.”

Little did he know that his recovery was fragile. The Covid pandemic took away his routine and structure: “All the external pillars that were tightly holding me together – the engagements at the office, the work trips.” Two years earlier, he and his husband had moved from Manhattan to a leafy suburb, from where he is speaking to me over a video call today. He was dealing with uncertainty and felt isolated. “We know one thing about shame: shame breeds in isolation.”

After his fall from grace, media’s former enfant terrible is now sober and helping others with his addiction recovery newsletter and podcast, The Small Bow

Every other Tuesday, AJ Daulerio wakes up at 5.30am and meditates for five to 20 minutes before beginning his multistep daily journaling protocol: reading a selection from a poetry anthology, then a passage from one of his daily wisdom readers (his go-to is a heavily annotated copy of Leo Tolstoy’s A Calendar of Wisdom); writing his Fear of the Day and gratitude list, then sharing his spiritual takeaway in a note to his three kids.

After a banana and coffee, Daulerio trains Brazilian jujitsu before hitting a 9.45am meditation at Besant Lodge – a community center just below the Hollywood sign that once served as a meeting place for mid-century mystics – immediately followed by him leading a recovery meeting of his own through Zoom.

The comedian and broadcaster narrates the heartfelt and at times self-lacerating account of his relationship with alcohol

A memoir chronicling the comic and broadcaster John Robins’s life in alcohol and his subsequent path to sobriety, Thirst is structured around the drinks that changed his life. There’s the bottle of Jacob’s Creek wine left out on a kitchen worktop which he helped himself to at the age of seven, secreting it into his orange juice, and the beer given to him at scout camp which he drank alone. There’s also his stomach-churning recreation, while on a comedy tour of Australia, of the white russians drunk by the Dude in The Big Lebowski using a gallon of milk, a litre of vodka and a bottle of Kahlua.

As an adult, Robins, who is best known for his shows on Radio X and on BBC5 Live, romanticised pubs, which he saw as places of peacefulness and refuge. He even co-hosted the podcast The Moon Under Water where he invited guests to describe their ideal pub. Robins reveals that what kept him drinking for so long was the lie that he was in control. That he could, on occasion, get through a Dry January convinced him he couldn’t be an addict, although he got a wakeup call when a GP told him to “sort your fucking life out”.

Pop and rock legend tells Sunday Times of drinking problem and ill health after final Genesis tour in 2021

Phil Collins has said that he suffered life-threatening alcoholism in recent years.

Speaking to the Sunday Times, the pop and rock legend, 75, said that his drinking began after he stopped taking Antabuse, a drug that causes illness if alcohol is consumed, which he had been using since an earlier period of alcoholism.

After two friends sponsored each other in Alcoholics Anonymous, they started making music. As they gear up for a summer of 40 festivals, the band tell their harrowing yet uplifting story

On stage in a Camden pub, Barry Quinlan, frontman of Irish rockers Bleech 9:3, shares the intensity of Joy Division’s Ian Curtis. He hunches and jerks around the mic stand and his eyes bore a hole in the back wall as jubilant teenagers expand and contract in a circle pit. The gig in mid-May has the same I-was-there energy as early Arctic Monkeys or Fontaines DC shows; with major labels signing Bleech 9:3 on both sides of the Atlantic, dozens of festival dates this summer and a wildly impressive, impassioned five-song debut EP, the band will soon be playing much bigger rooms than this.

But when I meet Barry and his three bandmates earlier on that day, there’s none of that twitchy energy. Bleech 9:3 bring calm to a meeting room in their management company’s offices as staff bustle around outside. That stillness is hard-earned: Barry and guitarist Sam Duffy are each other’s sponsor for Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). Quinlan smiles: “It’s an anonymous programme, so we’ll say ‘alleged sponsor’.”

Cannes film festival: Performer is as good as ever but her actor character is thinly conceived in a fundamentally implausible depiction of how to grapple with alcoholism

It’s always a pleasure to see that funny, smart performer Adèle Exarchopoulos in Cannes – after all, she made Cannes history by being jointly awarded the Palme d’Or for the 2013 film Blue Is the Warmest Colour, sharing the big prize itself with the director Abdellatif Kechiche and her co-star Léa Seydoux. Exarchopoulos has her moments in this film from Jeanne Herry, in which she plays an actor struggling with a drinking problem. The scenes in which we see her up on stage, boisterously performing in a touring theatre for schoolkids, are genuinely great. But really this is a very glib and unsatisfying drama, whose essential naivety becomes apparent when the lead character is forced to confront the crisis in her life.

Exarchopoulos plays a young actor called Garance; she adores Arletty’s character of the same name in Marcel Carné’s movie classic Les Enfants du Paradis. At the moment, she has an assistant stage manager position in a prestigious Paris repertory company, believing herself to be on the verge of getting some serious speaking parts when the next season’s casting is announced. But she is instead relegated to the touring schools company, where her undoubted talents are compromised by partying extremely hard every night and waking up with a terrible hangover every morning.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, Liverpool-born actor says depression and anxiety followed death of his father when he was 15

The actor David Morrissey has spoken of how “terrible” social anxiety contributed to him becoming an alcoholic.

“I am a recovering alcoholic,” Morrissey, who has been sober for 21 years, told Lauren Laverne on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs. “Drinking first was about anxiety. I’ve had this terrible social anxiety and that helped me get through it.”

For most of his life, John Robins assumed he got more out of alcohol than it took from him. Now he knows it was the other way round

• ‘I picked up the bottle of wine and drank straight out of it. I was seven’ Read an exclusive extract from his new memoir

The comedian John Robins has always loved talking about booze. In his standup, he used to portray himself as a bon viveur who knew how to give himself the best of times; a larky drinker out for a laugh; a nerdy tippler who recorded nights out in Sherlock Holmes-themed notepads – arrival time, drinks consumed, percentages of alcohol, pub atmosphere. He also had a routine about contracting gout, even though he never has done in real life.

On the radio, he hosted a show with his friend Elis James in which they meticulously detailed pub crawls and coined the phrase “Keep it session”, encouraging listeners to stick to low-alcohol beer when out for the whole evening. If anybody was in doubt about his love of booze, Robins then devised a podcast series called The Moon Under Water, named after George Orwell’s 1946 essay describing the perfect pub. In it, Robins and his co-host Robin Allender invited guests to design their dream watering hole. Yet, despite dedicating so much time to the discussion of booze, Robins could never find the right word to describe his relationship with it. Then in 2023 he finally discovered it: alcoholic.

An exclusive extract from the comedian’s new memoir

• ‘I wanted alcohol to take me to a place where I was not’ Read an interview with John Robins

The first time I tasted alcohol that wasn’t licked off a cork would have been at about the age of five or six. I’m terrible with years and the memory is incredibly hazy. But I was at the house of my godmother, Heather. For some reason they were drinking champagne. I don’t think I remember my mum drinking any kind of alcohol more than a dozen times in my whole life. She claims, and I believe her, to never have been drunk. Considering her son has been drunk, and I’m working from the back of a fag packet here, 4,000 times, that’s quite a contrast. But champagne?! What could the occasion have been? The opening ceremony of the Seoul Olympics? The formation of the Lib Dems? (Wikipedia page doing a lot of heavy lifting here.) Had my dad just moved out? Had the divorce papers come through? Maybe they just had a silly moment, in that wonderful way normal drinkers do – champagne on a Wednesday afternoon! Aren’t we naughty!

For some reason they let me have a sip. Maybe I nagged them until it became intolerable; maybe I just put on my most irresistible face. Maybe they just let me, because of how normal it is to let a child have a sip, and I mean a sip, of wine or beer. Nothing could be more normal. There wasn’t a lot of alcohol around when I was a kid. If we went to a restaurant, Mum might have a gin and tonic. It’s a cliche, but there may have been a glass of sherry at Christmas. It wasn’t a big part of our lives.

Questionnaire completed by 10,000 people finds sobriety on rise, with women slightly more abstemious than men

One in four adults in England do not drink alcohol, with increasing numbers of men and young people deciding to stay sober, according to a survey.

The figures, which come from a questionnaire of 10,000 people as part of the Health Survey for England, found that almost a quarter (24%) of adults in England had not drunk alcohol in 2024, an increase from just under a fifth (19%) in 2022.

After losing her father to alcohol addiction, author Sophie Calon turned to writing – and found clarity, connection and hope in other stories of relapse and recovery

On the night of Boxing Day 2021, my dad’s body was found near a Cardiff hostel. His death, at 55, was as sudden as it was not. For years, alcoholism had been changing the shape of his heart.

He died less than a mile from his old office; top law firm, equity partner. Four miles from our once tight-knit home in a leafy neighbourhood. He had lost both his family and his job in 2019. Raised in Barry, working class, he had been proud of the beautiful life he had built for us. Others thought he “had it all”. He was widely adored, but drinking made him volatile. He was homeless and often behind bars in his final two years.

Funding to end immediately for up to 2,800 grantees of US agency that serves thousands seeking help and in recovery

The Trump administration on Tuesday evening unexpectedly canceled up to $1.9bn in funding for substance use and mental health care, which providers say will immediately affect thousands of patients.

“It feels like Armageddon for everyone who’s on the frontlines of the addiction and mental health space,” said Ryan Hampton, founder of Mobilize Recovery, a national advocacy organization for people in and seeking recovery.

The actor’s publicist and manager worked with him for more than 30 years, before his death in 2023. They discuss the man behind the headlines – and why they are continuing his mission to help others struggling with addiction

Watch the third season of Friends, writes Matthew Perry in his memoir, and you can see how thin he had become by the end of it. “Opioids fuck with your appetite, plus they make you vomit constantly,” he writes. Look again, and yes – his fragile wrists emerge from a shirt that looks as if he has borrowed it from someone far larger, his trousers hang off him – and it’s unbearably sad now, with the knowledge that addiction would kill Perry nearly 30 years later, at the age of 54. At the time, most people watching probably wouldn’t have noticed, dazzled instead by Perry’s sharpness and immaculate comic timing as Chandler Bing, the show’s dry wit. He was having to take 55 Vicodin pills a day – an opioid - just to function and avoid terrible withdrawal symptoms, but he was never high while he was working, he writes in Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing, which came out in 2022. He just had to make it to the end of the season so he could get help. Had the series lasted for more than its 25 episodes, he thought it would have killed him.

That was the first time Perry went into rehab. He was 26, and one of the biggest stars in the world. There would be more than 65 attempts to detox from drug and alcohol addiction over the next decades until his death in 2023. Last week, a doctor was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison for supplying ketamine in the lead-up to Perry’s death (though not the ketamine that killed him); three others who have pleaded guilty will be sentenced in the coming months.

Imagine what a relaxing and special celebration it could be if it was tailor-made just for you

• The modern mind is a column where experts discuss mental health issues they are seeing in their work

Now is the time of year when some of my clients want to talk about Christmas.

As a specialist in addiction, many are seeking my help for their drinking.