Featured Image Credit: Theo Wargo/Getty Images for The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
Topics: Eminem, Mental Health, Celebrity
Jess Battison
Topics: Eminem, Mental Health, Celebrity
Warning: This article contains discussion of drug addiction which some readers may find distressing.
Eminem has revealed more details about what led to him getting sober after realising he was ‘going to die’.
In his new documentary, STANS, the rapper has opened up further about his near-fatal overdose in 2007 as it led to him making a major change.
The film features rare archival footage, stylised recreations, intimate interviews and an original interview with Eminem himself to offer ‘a raw, loud, and revealing journey across his career – and the passionate audience that has grown with him’.
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And that includes looking at his accidental overdose on methadone which led to Slim Shady having to ‘relearn’ how to rap again before the release of Relapse in 2009.
The 52-year-old reflects on that time in STANS as he says: “After the overdose, I came home going, 'Yo, bro, I need something... I'm going to die if I don't do something.’”
At the time, the ‘Lose Yourself’ rapper was on the back of a ‘vicious cycle’ where he felt ‘depressed’ and needed ‘more pills’ before he suddenly woke up in a hospital bed.
Eminem recalls: “I didn’t how what the f**k happened. It seemed like I fell asleep, and I woke up with tubes in me and s**t. I wanted to get up. I couldn't move.”
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Having ‘relearned’ to rap and recovering from the overdose, he says he got a ‘lukewarm’ response to Relapse which ‘turned the lights on’ that he had to do ‘something different’.
“Why don’t you try embracing sobriety?” the ‘Houdini’ rapper thought.
The dad then realised he was no longer ‘embarrassed’ by it and decided to treat ‘sobriety like a superpower’.
“I was proud of the fact that I could quit,” he adds.
And now, Eminem is 17 years sober.
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During a 2022 appearance on the Paul Pod podcast, his manager and host Paul Rosenberg discussed how doctors had to ‘stable’ the star with a ‘few medications’.
And the rapper agreed that it was a ‘whole different experience’ for him to be creating music without ‘substances in your body’.
“I remember when I first got sober and all the s**t was out of my system, I remember just being, like, really happy and everything was f**king new to me again. [Relapse] was the first album and the first one that I had fun recording in a long time,” he said.
“It was like the first time I started having fun with music again and relearning how to rap.”
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