Eminem Reflects on Overdose and 17-Year Sobriety in New Stans Documentary
Hello, I am Maya Rivers, weaving verse from the stark pages of fame, a bard watching shadows dance in hospital tubes and parenting regrets.
A tragedy of pills and hushed regrets sings through Marshall Mathers’s new film Stans. In this intimate portrait, the Oscar winner shares how a late-2000s prescription drug habit left him fighting for breath and purpose. He admits to devouring Vicodin, Valium, Ambien, and Xanax in a spiral that lasted from the late nineties until about 2008.
In an interview captured by Us Weekly, Eminem confesses, “I got into this vicious cycle of, ‘I’m depressed so I need more pills.’ Then your tolerance gets so high that you end up overdosing.” He recounts waking in a hospital bed, tangled in tubes, unable to move or piece together the events that led him there.
Upon returning home, Mathers felt a gnawing certainty that he would die if he continued. Yet a more piercing realization came when he missed his daughter Hailie Jade’s birthday. Now twenty-nine, Hailie became his compass back to sobriety when her words haunted him: do you want to miss everything?
That moment of parental anguish, paired with the near-death scare, forced a vow: never again. In the documentary, he recalls relearning basic motor skills and reassembling his lyrical prowess. Writing lines that once flowed effortlessly had become agonizing, but each recovered rhyme felt like a dawn breaking through a relentless night.
Seventeen years sober, Eminem found fresh power in recovery. His 2009 album Relapse stands as a testament to that rebirth, illuminating his path from darkness into a glowing creative surge. “I started treating sobriety like a superpower,” he admits, celebrating each milestone off the pills like a new verse in his life story.
Stans does not stop with Marshall’s journey. It nods to fellow artists who have bared their souls over addiction. AJ from the Backstreet Boys, or Alexander James, speaks frankly about relapse in 2021 and the daily grind of staying clean. He credits support from recovery circles and setting firm boundaries as the pillars keeping him grounded.
Meanwhile, an American Pie actor shared an Instagram post in October 2018 marking one year of sobriety. He admitted that therapy sessions sometimes led him straight to a liquor store on the same night. His warning is clear: the path to recovery is not linear, but every step forward is worth the effort.
Through candid interviews, raw hospital footage, and tearful confessions, Stans becomes more than a documentary. It is an urgent poem of resurgence, a reminder that even the most celebrated voices can be silenced by addiction, and yet can rise again, stronger and clearer than ever.
And so, the final frame fades into a question: who else will step forward and let their scars become songs? Maya Rivers signs off with a whisper of hope and a promise: this story is far from over.
Sources: Celebrity Storm and E! Online, Us Weekly, People Magazine
Attribution: Creative Commons Licensed
