"Celebrity Rehab With Dr. Drew"
What's 'Celebrity Rehab'?
This show is about just treating celebrities, straight up. Just plain old treatment of celebrities who courageously stepped up and let us document the process.
How did Celebrity Rehab develop?
This most recent project, VH1 Celebrity Rehab, was the brainchild of John Irwin and his company. They came to me and I really did not believe we could do it. I thought there were too many insurmountable, technically, legally, I just thought there were too many things. John is the kind of guy that just does not take "No" for an answer. We kept moving forward, moving forward, and we kept solving problem after problem. Pretty soon we were doing it. For me, I did not make a thorough commitment to this until Bob Forrest, he is a guy you will see on the program if you watch. He and I work together professionally all the time, and he is the most talented chemical dependency counselor I have ever worked with. He came to me one day and shut the door to my office and said, I am so sick and tired of people disparaging treatment. They do not know what they are talking about. No one ever gets to to see what treatment is. We need to do a television program where people actually see treatment done right. Funny you should say that. We are in these conversations, if you really think this is a good idea, I said I will move forward with this. He said yes. We have to do this.
What's rehab?
There is no simple explanation of what treatment is. That's why we needed to do it. Because you can't describe treatment in a fight. Its an experiential process. It's complicated, indifferent really almost for every patient. You kind of have to see it. You have to see how it works to really understand it. It's interesting as it regards to us fulfilling our desire to help people understand what treatment is. There's a big piece of treatment that we left out intentionally and it's a strength and a weakness of the program. Which is we try to be very, very respectful to the 11th tradition of Alcoholics Anonymous, which is you don't really have people talking about their participation in a 12-step process. And they 12-step is the cornerstone of our treatment. So while we're doing all of this emotional work, within the context of the 12-step, but we left that out of the tv show intentionally. So it's a strength, we didn't trample on that 11th tradition, but it's a weakness because people may get the idea that it's not a big part of treatment, which it is.
Why were celebrities chosen for the rehab show?
The celebrities chosen for the rehab show was for multiple reasons. One is that, I know from Love Line, every night we'd have a celebrity on and they would always pull me aside during commercial breaks and tell me their stories, and so I knew there was lots of psychopathology, lots of addiction amongst celebrities. And I actually pubished the first ever scientific study on celebrities. We gave them a personality inventory every time they came in over a year, so we had over 200 celebrities and the published ad shows that they have lots and lots and lots of problems that they come to their celebrity status with, not as a result of being a celebrity, the need to be a celebrity is somebody that's got stuff going on. I actually wanted to put regular people and celebrities together and really show that we treat celebrities and regular citizens the same. I mean celebrities shouldn't be treated any differently than anybody else when it comes to treatment of addiction. In fact, treating them specially really complicates and confounds their treatment.
What's the difference between regular people in rehab and celebrities in rehab?
In the course of interviewing regular people for the show, I realize that regular people, when you start talking with them about going through an experience like this in front of the camera, really don't understand the implications. They could not. Not a single person could really understand what I was talking about when I talked about whether they feel shame, whether they have a problem, whether it be to evocative. They were just confused by the questions. Well, the celebrities, in terms of them rendering informed consent to being on camera, totally got it. I mean Mary Carey summed it up for me. She goes, "Dr. Drew, I've done pretty much everything in front of a camera. This is not a big deal to me." And the same thing, Bridgette Neilson says, "I've been on The Surreal Life, this is me being a person for a change. I'm happy to do that."
Why do you think 'Celebrity Rehab' is popular?
The celebrity part really was responsible for a couple of things. One was, all you see when you turn on the television now, is celebrity drug addicts running amok, I mean people seemed so focused on this, and for me it is heartbreaking to see that, not have people understand that these people are dying, and here's what we should be doing with them, and we should be sort of helping them participate, if they want to show something, show them getting better, this is what that process would be. I think people are drawn in by celebrity, again, one of my initial goals was to show that celebrities are treated no differently than anybody else, I ended up having to abandon that idea, even though I didn't treat them any differently, we ended up just using a group of celebrities.
Why do celebrities fall off the wagon so often?
Here's the deal. If I had a treatment, and I said to you, "I have this great treatment, and while you do the treatment, your disease will go completely into remission, but when you stop doing the treatment, the disease may recur." What would you consider that treatment? Good treatment or bad treatment? Perfect treatment. That's what we consider the ideal treatment. We give you insulin, or you take your insulin -- blood sugar's under control. You remove the insulin -- blood sugar goes out of control. Same exact thing is true with addiction. People when they participate in the treatment process, they do great. The problem is keeping them in the process. When they drift away from it, their disease recurs. It works. They've just got to keep working it.
