Today's Evil Beet Gossip

Motherhood Drove Brooke Mueller Back to Crack

We’re all wondering what the hell went wrong in the Sheen/Mueller household and friends of Brooke may finally have answers. Postpartum depression! Classic!

A pal of Brooke’s spoke to Us Weekly:

A family friend says that Brooke’s relapse to drugs began shortly after the twins’ birth. Born severely underweight, young Max was hospitalized for weeks. “It was a really scary situation for a new mom — for any new mom — and at that point she went back to her comfort zone…she resorted to the way she handled stress in the past.”

Hey! OK! So if this story is remotely the truth, that’s pretty sad. Not just because Brooke was so torn up about her babies’ health, but because she didn’t have the tools to face the problem without relapsing. With a rich husband and plenty of family and friends around to keep her on the right track, there’s really no excuse for someone like Brooke to turn to drugs. Do I think she had postpartum depression, an actual condition that threatens lots of women, or do I think that she’s probably just a drug addict? Probably a little bit of both.

23 CommentsLeave a comment

  • ok, so the understandable part is that her children were born prematurerly, but she handled it by taking drugs? that sounds a bit backwards to me, especially as shes a new mum, she needs to take on responsibilities…

  • Wow molls. you really don’t understand. drug addiction is a disease. it takes over one’s mind. to say there is no excuse is just naive. i mean, not that drug addiction is an EXCUSE to do drugs. but you have to understand, it’s a demon that takes over one’s mind. it’s not like a drug addict can necessarily just be rational about drug use….like “oh i probably shouldn’t use drugs to relieve stress.”

    • It can become a physical dependency and even a fatal dependency, but to call if it were truly a disease, then why do 12-step programs work so well?

      When you have cancer or Parkinson’s (insert disease here), you don’t go into rehab or a 12- step program to treat it.

      • I get what you’re saying but addiction IS a disease. That’s one thing they teach you in 12 step programs. 12 step programs don’t “cure” the disease of addiction. They “arrest” it. It’s not as if after you’ve completed a 12 step program, or rehab, that you are cured from addiction. It’s not like you won’t ever have the urge to drink or use again. That’s not how it works. Once you complete the 12 steps, you basically do them over and over again in order to remain sober and continue to “arrest” the disease. 12 step programs teach addicts how to control their urges and not give in to the disease/desire to use, but they don’t get rid of it.

      • P.S. The difference with cancer or Parkinson’s or something like that is that they are curable. You do chemo and take medicine and all that because you can cure those sorts of diseases. But because addiction can’t be cured, you do a different sort of program, such as a 12 step program, to learn how to live with the disease.

      • Okay. Sorry, I don’t know much about Parkinson’s.
        But my point still holds. Curable diseases (whichever ones those are, since apparently not Parkinson’s), require different treatment than something like addiction, that isn’t curable.

    • Correction and another thought:
      but if it were truly a disease (not but to call if it were truly a disease)
      and
      She was in rehab, supposedly for alcohol abuse, when she was five moths pregnant. That is probably why her baby was underweight. The twins may have brain damage as well.

      And why did she have twins? Do they run in either family? I haven’t heard that. She may have had to have fertility treatments in order to conceive, in which case, she really wanted to have mealtickets – I mean children – with a rich man, even though she knew perfectly well that they were both addicts and that was part of the attraction.

      Good luck little Sheens – I smell more Redmond O’Neals and Cameron Douglases coming down the pipeline in about 12 years.

      • For human beings, “disease” is a broad term under which drug addiction and alcoholism fall. Alcoholism and drug addiction just happen to be diseases that can be treated reasonably well with psychological/physical/chemical therapies.

      • Yes, treated but not cured. And by “for human beings,” what I mean is that “disease” is a more broadly defined term when used to classify human issues than it is when used to classify issues of other life forms.

  • It doesn’t sound like either the above commenter or the above post understand much about addiction and coping mechanisms. Addiction doesn’t tend to discriminate based on income, so why do you always keep pulling the “rich” card to lambast people who clearly need help adopting healthy coping mechanisms, rather than your clearly uninformed, self-righteous judgement?

    Did spouting all of that make you feel really good? Are you a better person by comparison now?

    Lately these blogs just seem like a lot of e-bullying for the insecure.

    Clearly this woman’s (and her family’s) situation is very sad, but so is the dialogue on this site.

  • This post, and the first commenter, don’t seem to much about addiction. If I wanted to read a bunch of heavy handed, naive, self-righteous tripe that was written on for the sake of increasing the days number of posts, I’d be on Perez Hilton right now.

    To be honest, these blogs seem to be more and more the rantings of the insecure.

    This woman’s situation is certainly sad, but so is the discussion it seems to sparking.

    I also find it increasingly bizarre that a blog that affiliates itself with Zelda Lily, a self-proclaimed and highly feminist blog, would engage in so much finger pointing and mother bashing.

  • I agree with most of the posts on here about addiction being something a person will live with forever.
    However, I have no sympathy for those people. They got themselves into the the situation, pure and simple. Brooke chose to do drugs. She chose to neglect her responsibilities as a mother.
    I totally agree with Molls saying that Brooke had no excuse to turn to drugs when she has all the support and best medical care she can receive (especially being wealthy).
    There is no excuse to do drugs; only reasons that justify bad behavior.

  • A woman has no particular superiority that makes her immune from criticism just because she has given birth. Neither does a man have the same superiority because he has fathered children.

    People deserve criticism if they knowingly undertake actions that damage others, especially children.

    Brooke is not a victim of “mother bashing” any more than Charlie is a victim of father bashing. They are being criticized for destructive behavior that is damaging themselves, each other and their families.

  • Watching episodes of Dr. Phil doesn’t qualify you to diagnose psychopathological disorders, Molls. Either that or my psychology degrees were unnecessary..

    She seems to only be suffering from a substance abuse relapse due to the stress of being a new mother. This stress isn’t a symptom of PPD, it’s a symptom of motherhood! Do me a favor and leave diagnoses to the professionals.

  • I have never had a drug problem, but I have had twins, and it was terrifying. The anxiety I felt over caring for two newborns was crippling, and I can’t imagine what it would have been like to couple that with addiction issues.

  • She was abusing before she was pregnant, while she was pregnant and now after she gave birth. So the substance abuse was not caused by post-partum depression.

    And this very wealthy couple can afford all the child care they need to help offset the demands of having twins. Obviously someone is caring for those children 24/7 while both parents are in rehab. So they probably didn’t feel the terror you describe because they have ample help.

  • i smell a sympathy building campaign. next we’ll here that the combination of PPD AND charlie sheen’s rage was what caused her relapse. which will fold nicely into the custody battle and $$ support that will no doubt play out shortly.

    its all PR in the end.