Self-Medicating - Simon Pegg’s experience with self-medication is likely familiar to many other recovering addicts. It absolutely reflects my own life story. Like Pegg, I was diagnosed with depression as a teenager, and started “treating” it with alcohol from an early age. Alcohol made me feel better in the moment, while doing nothing whatsoever to address the underlying issue. In fact, by the time I eventually got sober at age 29, my depression had grown worse than ever before. This falls exactly in line with a warning from the CDC that excessive alcohol use may increase anxiety, depression, and other mental health issues.
Simon Pegg drew on his experiences with addiction when co-writing The World’s End with Edgar Wright. The movie is a science-fiction comedy about a group of friends trying to complete a pub crawl which ends at a bar called “The World’s End.”Fittingly, as they progress through the bars, aliens invade, putting the characters in the wake of a potential literal “world’s end.” It’s a funny movie, but it’s also a parable about alcoholism. As everything goes to hell around them, Pegg’s character remains obsessed with finishing the pub crawl.
Pegg told Jonze “that’s what addiction is like. It’s like you have grown a second head and all it wants to do is destroy itself, and it puts that ahead of everything else — your marriage, children, your job.”