General Hospital‘s Jacob Young opened up for the first time about secretly battling an addiction for years.
“I had some dental surgery done,” Young, 46, shared on a recent episode of the “Imperfectly Perfect” podcast. “And I ended up getting a prescription for Vicodin. This is something I’ve never been completely open about. I started getting hooked on opioids and I went through seven years of my life wasted on opioids.”
Young recalled “just needing to [feel] numb,” claiming the pills were “the one thing that made me feel normal.” He also claimed his drug use “never affected my work,” adding, “I always showed up, I always did my lines. I was always well-studied.”
He continued: “I was living a lie. I was living an absolute lie. There was no two ways about it. And I would show up pretending that I’m completely normal, that everything is fine in my life, and then go home [and] realize that I just completely lied to everyone that entire day.”
Young hid his issues from loved ones — including wife Christen Steward, with whom he shares three kids — until he couldn’t anymore.
“Nobody knew. Even my wife didn’t know,” he said. “I finally broke down and told her the truth. I was like, ‘Look, I’m addicted. And I can’t get off this because I don’t want to get sick, but I need help.’”
Young was able to get clean after going into counseling. “I wanted to get to the root of ‘Why? Why am I needing to do this?’” he noted. “[I was] working my way out of it … That was a journey, to get off of that. That was really tough.”
Through therapy, Young was able to pinpoint how his childhood influenced his eventual addiction to opioids. The actor was thrust into the public eye in 1997 after being cast on The Bold and the Beautiful. He grew up in poverty, claiming there were times when his family was “literally starving.” After his father remarried, his stepmother “quickly became like a second mom.”
But when Young was 16, his stepmother died by suicide, which led him to “a whole new understanding of who I was, why life exists, how things can seconds suddenly change in a second … I was going through stuff that I didn’t realize that I was ever going to go through.”
Professionally, Young was thriving, and his role on The Bold and the Beautiful scored him a Daytime Emmy nomination. He also started experimenting with recreational marijuana use.
“I started smoking weed when I was like 14 years old,” he said. “And I think that was one of the ways I was coping, right? I’d hang out with my friends, we’d go camp, chill by a river, fish … we’d smoke our weed and hang out.”
Following his time on The Bold and the Beautiful, Young found success on General Hospital before another role caused him to move to the East Coast.
“I wasn’t even interested in alcohol until I got into my later mid-20s,” Young recalled. “But as I got older and I was living in New York City … I was working on All My Children at the time, and you know, you have everything within three square blocks for the most part, right? And it became very easy because I wasn’t driving, right? I was always taking a taxi or public transportation, and so [I] started getting into really drinking a lot more excessively.”
Young explained how drinking became a coping mechanism. “I don’t think I realized the trauma that I had been through,” he shared. “I was drinking a beer or two, or three, four [and] that started becoming a habit to help ease the anxiety, all untreated from earlier years of my life. So I started leaning heavily on alcohol.”
From there, Young started to use cocaine. “I was a single guy, I was making a ton of money in New York, but I wanted to find those people [to party with], but I didn’t know why,” he said. “Because I was going basically undiagnosed. I was dealing with resentment, depression, old wounds that were still bleeding inside of me. And those [the drugs] seemed to just knock all that out.”
Young ultimately gave up drugs when he met his wife. The couple got married in 2007, welcoming son Luke the following year. Daughters Molly and Grace were born in 2013 and 2016, respectively.
While battling his addiction to opioids, Young was grateful for the support he received in getting clean.
“I’m not afraid to talk about it. We are all going through something in our lives,” he concluded. “Whether it’s raising children, trying to navigate that, whether it’s just trying to raise yourself and figure out, ‘Where am I in my headspace today?’”
If you or someone you know is struggling with substance abuse, contact the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357).
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