Pete Davidson: What Nobody Talks About When They Talk About Pete Davidson
Pete Davidson is one of the most recognisable faces on American television, known for his years on Saturday Night Live and a personal life that has attracted more public attention than his work. He is funny, self-aware and has spoken more openly about his mental health and substance use than almost anyone else at his level of fame. He is also someone who has been dealing with serious mental health challenges since childhood and who has used substances in ways that have at times become genuinely problematic even as he has been open and even comedic about that fact in public.
Davidson’s father was a New York City firefighter who died responding to the September 11 attacks in 2001. Pete was seven years old. He has spoken about that loss as the defining event of his life and the root of much of what followed, including the anxiety, the depression and eventually a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder that he received as a young adult. He started using marijuana heavily as a teenager, describing it as a way to manage the anxiety that had been a constant presence since childhood. He entered rehabilitation at 17 and has continued to work on his relationship with substances and mental health throughout his career.
“I have been a pothead forever. I smoked myself stupid and I would tell people it was for my stomach because I have Crohn’s disease. But honestly, a lot of it was because I was unhappy and I did not know why.”
What makes Davidson unusual is that he has been willing to be honest while it is still happening rather than in retrospect from the safety of a long sobriety. He has talked about treatment, about the ongoing work of managing his mental health and about the relationship between his mental health and his substance use in real time. That honesty has made him, for a lot of young people in particular, someone who makes it easier to talk about their own struggles. His story is also a clear illustration of something that is common but underacknowledged: the way mental health conditions and substance use become intertwined in ways that make both harder to treat. Both need to be addressed at the same time. He has been explicit about this, describing the way substance use affected his ability to benefit from psychiatric treatment and the way getting that balance wrong made everything harder for a long time.
Pete Davidson is not a clean recovery story. He is an ongoing one and that ongoing quality is part of what makes it worth paying attention to. Recovery for many people is not a single dramatic moment. It is a long process of learning how to live with a condition that does not go away.
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