Ep 142: ‘This Isn’t The Real Me’ | Rethinking Alcohol |

This episode touches on addiction and on the loss of a child to a fatal overdose. It's a tender one, so please take care whilst listening. And if that's not something you have capacity for today, it's completely okay to come back another time.

What if the person you love is slipping away beneath the weight of addiction, and you’re left battling shame, silence, and a culture that blames individuals while ignoring the deeper crisis? In this profoundly moving episode, Anna Donaghey speaks to Katie Rizzo, a mother who lost her son Nicholas to a fatal overdose after years of struggling with alcohol and substance dependence.

This is a story shaped by grief, but also by everything that comes after. Katie bravely challenges the stigma and secrecy that surround addiction within families and in society at large. She shares Nicholas’s sensitive nature, the anxiety that haunted him, and the relentless pressure to appear happy and successful. Anna and Katie discuss how addiction is viewed as a personal failing, why shame forces families into silence, and what it means to support a loved one with compassion rather than judgement.

You’ll hear firsthand about the ways social comparison, anxiety, and unrealistic ideals fuel substance misuse in young people and why the myth of individual willpower is so dangerous. Anna and Katie invite listeners to rethink not only how we talk about drinking, but how vulnerability, honesty, and community are the real routes to healing.

Highlights:

00:00 Trigger warning: addiction and the loss of a child

01:13 Who Nicholas was, behind the statistics and labels

03:46 How social pressure and anxiety feed substance use

07:13 Why “this isn’t the real me”: inside the mind of addiction

12:52 The myth of willpower, the reality of relapse

18:20 Family stigma and shame: breaking the silence

28:22 Why addiction is a human issue not a moral failing