Mixing prescription medications — including medical marijuana — and alcohol is recommended by zero doctors. This is worrisome.
Courtney Stodden’s been through life stresses at 22 that most people don’t experience until they’re decades older — if ever.
She’s a reality star, so there’s the stress of fame. There’s her mother, Krista Keller, who is a real piece of work and from whom Courtney is estranged.
That distance from Mommy Dearest is exactly right for Courtney’s well-being, but it’s also a serious life stressor. She had a famous and tragic miscarriage in 2016 and she’s still grieving.
And, oh by the way, Courtney’s getting a divorce.
Divorces, no matter how amicable, always make the lists of life’s biggest stressors. It’s up there with death of a loved one. Add to that the fact that her husband, Doug Hutchison, is 34 years her senior.
He was already 50 when she married him … at 16. That’s not on Courtney; that’s on her mother and on Doug.
Everybody has their own coping mechanisms, and not all of them are necessarily healthy.
Courtney recently spoke about her desires, and it’s hard to hear this and not be concerned.
“I just want some normalcy now … and I don’t know if I’m coping in the most healthy way,” she admitted on The Doctors.
“I also have been taking anti-anxiety medication, otherwise I literally feel like I’m going to jump out the window. Sometimes, I have medical marijuana, but that doesn’t really help because I start having a panic attack.”
At least she knows what works and what doesn’t. More importantly, she knows that what she’s doing now isn’t helping. It sounds trite, but just admitting it is the first step to making things better.
For a reality star who people love to classify as a “dumb blonde,” Courtney seems very aware of the factors that are influencing her state of mind.
For one thing, her marriage to a 50-year-old man when she was 16. “My mother was the one who granted permission. Now, when I’m explaining the story, it’s like: ‘Oh God, this is crazy!"”
Well, yeah.
“I went from my parents to another parental figure,” she remarks with some brutal honesty. Ugh, that whole situation was so creepy.
At 22, now separated from Doug, she’s finally getting to be a young person. Even though she says that she feels like she’s “lived so many lives at such a young age,” and she’s not wrong, she is still a young woman who didn’t get to have the normal experiences of early adulthood.
Being young usually involves partying. Especially when you’re beautiful and famous.
Well, not if you’re in a fertility cult. Sorry, Duggar girls.
If you think about it, Courtney spent what could have been her college years married to a middle-aged actor. That’s not a normal life. To an extent, some partying and even some pill-popping are much more age-appropriate behaviors than, say, her marriage.
But it is important for her to find the right balance. That means weighing having a healthy amount of fun with staying alive.
“I literally feel like my coping mechanisms could lead to a disastrous, vicious situation,” she admits. “I think if I seek the proper coping mechanisms, I could turn this around and be the young woman that I want to be.”
Fortunately, she’s talking about this openly — especially on The Doctors, where they offered to go over her medications and see what was working and what might need to change.
But the fact that she’s talking about all of this in the public sphere is enough to show that she wants to make sure that her celebrations of newfound freedom aren’t cut tragically short.
It would be horrible if the substances that she uses to resist autodefenestration led to a different tragedy