By Suzanne Riss

Women are providing some of the most complex and provocative portrayals of addiction on television, helping broaden awareness and understanding. Unlike Mad Men that glamorizes addiction or Celebrity Rehab and My Strange Addiction that portray it as a circus sideshow, several television shows are offering more nuanced portrayals. Junk-food obsessed L.A.P.D. Deputy Chief Brenda Leigh Johnson on The Closer, pill-popping Jackie Peyton on Nurse Jackie, and recovering alcoholic Abby Lockhart on ER depict various stages of addiction and recovery that experts say can help educate viewers and jump start conversations.

On The Closer, Brenda doesn’t yet experience the negative impact of her obsession with sweets. She’s in the early stages of something that may or may not develop into a full-blown addiction, experts say. For Nurse Jackie, marriage, work, and kids take a back seat to her craving for opiates. Figuring out how to keep a steady supply of Adderall, Vicodin, Percocet and Oxycontin at her fingertips informs her every move and thought. And while she probably wouldn’t admit it, she stands to lose everything. With Abby Lockhart on ER, we had the unusual experience of following a woman in recovery over the character’s 10 years on the show, seeing her two steps forward, one step backward journey that ultimately ended on a hopeful note.

“ER stands out because it showed Abby living and working as a recovering alcoholic,” says Robert Thompson, professor of popular culture at Syracuse University. “Following a woman in recovery over such a long period of time and in such depth is something we didn’t show on TV before.”

High stakes
Smart, accomplished and imperfect, these three women strike a chord with viewers. “Whether addiction touches your family or not, the topic has inherent drama and high stakes,” Thompson says. “If we as humans are defined by our free will, then addiction is a force that throws a wrench into that freedom. A person in the grip of addiction is no longer free.”

Addiction touches most families: 69 percent of Americans report knowing someone who has a problem with drug or alcohol use, according to a Harvard School of Public Health and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation survey. Television is catching up to the fact that women struggle with addiction too, says Jill Talbot, author of Loaded: Women and Addiction, in which she chronicled her own addictions. “We used to think of men when we thought of addicts, and we’d think of substance abuse only,” says Talbot, an assistant professor of nonfiction writing at Saint Laurence University. “Now we’re seeing more women struggling with a wide variety of addictions. It can help us realize that we’re not alone.”

Like many women today, these three TV characters all experience stress as a result of high-powered careers. Today there are more women in the workforce in the U.S. than men for the first time, and more women dealing with unprecedented stress as a result. “About 15 years ago, women came in for help because their family fell apart,” says Cecelia Jayme, a program supervisor at the Women’s Recovery Center at Hazelden, in Center City, MN. “Today I see women come in because their career and job are suffering. They’re often the primary breadwinner in their family and they’re struggling with addiction.” Jayme would like to see Nurse Jackie and Deputy Chief Brenda Leigh discover a path to recovery. “It’s important to depict the hope that people do recover,” she says. “And that they live well in recovery.”

Junk food cravings
On The Closer, (Mondays at 9 p.m. on TNT), Brenda’s career isn’t suffering from her junk food obsession. Though we see her hide junk food in drawers, purses and cupboards, she’s at the top of her game, making good use of her uncanny ability to extract confessions from subjects. “She’s a revision of the LA detective,” Talbot says. “Instead of a man at the desk, it’s a woman. Instead of a flask in the drawer, it’s candy.”

Brenda’s love of junk food may be more of a quirky character flaw than something resembling an eating disorder, but experts say there’s a lot to learn about eating disorders from Brenda. “It’s helpful to show a professional woman struggling with food issues. It makes it less stigmatized,” says Lisa Claudia Briggs, MSW, LICSW, an eating disorder specialist for 25 years and founder of Intuitive Body. “It can help more women talk about what’s going on for them, especially when they’re feeling stress.”

For Brenda, eating candy appears to be a direct response to stress on the job. “Eating disorders often serve to reduce anxiety,” says Dina Zeckhausen, PhD, Founder, the Eating Disorders Information Network (http://www.myedin.org). “Carbohydrates are a mood altering drug; they produce endorphins in the brain. Brenda’s career may be a contributor, but probably her driven, perfectionist personality contributed to her choice of a high stress career in the first place.”

Some viewers question whether someone as thin as Brenda is believable as a person with an eating disorder. “Not all women struggling with an eating disorder carry excess weight,” says Brigg. “Some purge or use laxatives. What they do have in common is that they are often very high achieving. They never see themselves as good enough. They’re people pleasers and caretakers.”

Actress Kyra Sedgwick, who portrays Brenda, has spoken of struggling with an eating disorder in her personal life many years ago, and has said that, “[Food] has never been easy for me.” Sedgwick has said she went to therapy to work on her food issues.

Brenda spent much of the premiere episode of the show secretly snacking on bags of candy. At one point we see her gaze become riveted by donuts sitting on a colleague’s desk. After solving a murder case, Brenda sat alone, and ate a Ring Ding. We see her shove an éclair into her mouth as her expression changes from frustration to bliss and she relaxes. She winds up instituting a ban on processed sugar in the office.

About 24 million people in the country have eating disorders, a figure that represents about 10 percent of the population, according to the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA). Lynn Grefe, CEO and President of NEDA, says people with eating disorders share certain characteristics: “They have anxiety, depression or OCD. They’re often the best and the brightest. They can have a fear of closeness and problems expressing anger.” Many people with eating disorders who are purging or using laxatives don’t realize how serious it is that they’re not digesting their food, she says. “They can suffer heart failure, potassium deficiency,” Grefe explains. “Eating disorders can ravage your body and become life threatening.”

In her experience, women with eating disorders are unhappy about the amount of time the disorders take up and that it controls their life. “If food is your primary focus, something may be wrong,” she says. “Talk to somebody about what’s really bothering you. You can get better.” She recommends doing research to find a therapist and a dietician who specialize in eating disorders.

Secrets and lies
While Brenda is in the early stages of what could develop into an eating disorder or addiction, Jackie is a full-blown addict that many say is one of the most consistently well told addiction stories on television. In Nurse Jackie (Showtime, Mondays, 10:30 p.m.) we have a compelling portrait of a woman whose life is overtaken by chaos and secrets. Jackie Peyton is a nurse at All Saints’ Hospital in New York City and the mother of two young girls, one of whom suffers from an anxiety disorder. Though smarter than most of the doctors she works with, Jackie has a weakness for painkillers that she hasn’t admitted to anyone. Married to a loving man who runs a bar, she has an affair with the hospital pharmacist in exchange for Vicodin.

Slipping into the hospital ladies room during her shift, Jackie will crush an Adderall or Vicodin capsule before snorting it. Nurse Jackie stars Edie Falco, an actress who has admitted to her own addiction to alcohol. Falco has been in recovery for the past 20 years, admitting that at one point in her life, she was “drunk all the time” and hanging out with “scary people.” The actress was drawn to playing a character that she has described as “pulled to something that’s so bad for you.” The show was created by Linda Wallem and Liz Brixius, both of whom have spoken about being in recovery and interested in putting their own life experiences to use in the story.

It’s not surprising that the show is universally praised for its gritty realism. “There are so many people out there like Nurse Jackie, working at jobs and functioning, who are addicts,” says Talbot, the author. “The program shows that despite having a good career, a devoted husband, great kids and a best friend, the most important relationship in her life is with pills. All of her other relationships suffer as a result.”

Melanie Olson, certified chemical dependency counselor at the Keystone Treatment Center in Canton, S.D., notes that Nurse Jackie does a good job of showing how an addiction can take on a life of its own. “I see women addicted to pain killers willing to go to great lengths to get them. They start going beyond the prescription, doctor shopping, and then they’re afraid of getting caught. They often didn’t realize the opiate was addictive until they tried to stop taking it. We work with people to help them understand that there will always will be stressors but you need to learn how to deal with life on life’s terms.”

About 2.3 million people use painkillers, stimulants and anti anxiety meds non-medically, according to the National institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). And many are still able to do their jobs. “People develop a tolerance so it might not be apparent,” says Dr. Susan Weiss, Acting Director, Office of Science Policy and Communications for NIDA. “But if you’re addicted, you become focused on getting drugs and can go into withdrawal, craving it. This affects how well you can concentrate and function. You can have impaired judgment.”

She thinks it’s useful to help people recognize that abusing prescription meds can get them into patterns they never thought they’d be in. “Nobody can say it won’t happen to me because I have good job,” she says. “Hopefully this show can help people see a growing problem that has worsening consequences.”

Experts say Nurse Jackie embodies many of the characteristics of an addict, including a sense of invincibility, a belief that she’s in control, and a compulsion so great that no sacrifice is too great to feed her addiction. “We see many high functioning women with addictions,” says Jayme from Hazelden. “We see women with jobs and kids who abuse methamphetamines to get to work on time and drive the van full of kids to soccer. We see housewives who take them to control their weight and then get addicted. They look functional, until things start to spiral out of control.”

When Jackie’s husband and best friend stage an intervention, it doesn’t go well. Jackie is an accomplished liar. Despite the chaos swirling around her life, she talked her way out of everything, at least for now.

Blacking out
The long-running hit show ER (CBS, 1994-2009) included another high-functioning woman struggling with addiction, yet this time she was in recovery. Nurse Abby Lockhart was a recovering alcoholic who had been sober for five years when we first met her. During the course of the show, the nurse-turned medical student-turned doctor got married and had a son. Played by actress Maura Tierney, Abby was seen living in recovery: She had a sponsor, went to AA meetings and even became the sponsor of a colleague, Dr. John Carter, whom she discovered shooting up pain killers.

We also saw Abby relapse. In one episode, she blacked out after drinking at a bar, and woke up in bed with the ER chief. When Abby had a particularly horrible birthday, she started drinking again, and then returned to her AA meetings.
Some addiction specialists wish this show discussed more about how relapsing happens. “I don’t see a lot of recovery information on TV. I’d like to see a TV show educate the public about the fact that relapse doesn’t come out of the blue. It’s a process,” says Olson of the Keyston Treatment Center. “If you’re going to meetings, people can help you recognize when you might be moving to a relapse. For Abby, showing the triggers, that she was starting to consider drinking again, that she was moving into a craving state, would have been helpful.”

At the end of the series, Abby told her co-workers about her alcohol addiction and sought help. It’s a hopeful portrayal, addiction specialists say, despite the setbacks. “It sends the message that recovery is not only possible but probable if you seek help,” says Jayme of Hazelden. “The addict keeps clean when she finds another way to fill her spiritual longing.”

Suzanne Riss is a writer and editor who specializes in women’s issues. Most recently she was Editor-in-Chief of  Working Mother magazine. Her book, The Working Mom Survival Guide, will be published by Weldon Owen in October.