With mergers like Disney-Fox threatening job duplication and the prospect of the Netflix well drying up, Hollywood professionals are very anxious types. “Everyone feels like they’re on a life raft from the Titanic,” says Larry Shaw, a Beverly Hills psychotherapist whose clients run the gamut from executive producers to screenwriters and showrunners. “It’s terrible in the California blue[-state] bubble. My patients who are execs, they’re watching how their films are being received in the theater right now. When they set out to make them, they knew, or thought they knew, what America was thinking and where the country was going. Now, worryingly, it seems they can’t find a compass.”
While self-medicating one’s angst is a long-standing Hollywood tradition, what’s new is the cornucopia of options that span the merely pharmaceutical to out-there wellness modalities.
The most in-demand ‘scripts (of the pill variety)? “Xanax, Klonopin and Adderall are the chief three,” says Charles Sophy, an L.A.-based psychiatrist with television talent and studio- and network-exec patients, “‘Can I have a little of this for when I need it?’ My patients ask for meds to glue them together.” Beverly Hills-based therapist Jenn Mann, who treats executives and directors, concurs. “For issues in the industry around job security,” she says, “Xanax is the go-to office drug.”
Sophy ,who is also medical director for the County of Los Angeles Department of Children and Family Services, adds that when allotted prescriptions run out, patients will go to some lengths to acquire more. “Assistants will come to me and say, ‘So-and-so lost their medicine.’ I have tell them I can’t give out more — ‘No, no not even if they pay cash.’ Or the assistant will come to me wanting to be a patient, and then ask for the same meds their boss asked for last week. Or they’ll send someone new from their team.”
“They’ll go from doctor to doctor,” says Mann. The local shrinks who treat this fretful — and resourceful — group of VIPs “all know, and we all know each other,” says Sophy. The internists know the psychologists who know the dermatologists, who know the pharmacists, who know the aliases patients use. “Recently, a showrunner who’d hurt his back asked me to refill, along with anxiety meds, the pain meds his GP had prescribed,” says Sophy. “I called the pharmacy, and they reported the other doc had just given him 30 more pills!” Still, the supply chain is hard to disrupt. “Because they’ll go father afield, into the suburbs and outskirts, and because many nonspecialists will jot off scripts for pharmaceuticals,” Sophy explains. “Women in Hollywood commonly get anti-anxiety drugs from their gynecologists, as a celebrity patient [had] who came to me after the Prozac she got from her gyno messed her up — because it wasn’t the right amount, nor the right chemical.”
Beyond anti-depressants and anti-anxiety benzodiazepines, showbiz insiders also reach for “yoga camps, shamans and psychics,” says Mari Murao, a Beverly Hills- and Topanga-based shrink who works with producers and actors. “The new ayahuasca is kambo,” an Amazonian tree frog poison cleanse, says Shaw. “One creative told me he did 90 kambo ‘trips’ in three years.”
Cannabis in a vape, capsule or edible is, of course, a major go-to. “It can be ordered like a pizza by an app to your door,” says Sophy. Adds Shaw: “I have a producer who went into MedMen” — an Apple store-like medical marijuana dispensary with multiple L.A. locations, including next to The Ivy — “and bought 20 kinds of CBD. Another patient, a vp of a large entertainment firm, regularly uses CBD with THC for big meetings,” he says. “Weed for work woes is very much a thing.”
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A version of this story first appeared in the July 18 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
