Spencer Matthews

Spencer Matthews

Spencer Matthews stopped drinking for someone else, and then for himself

Content note — this story covers a subject some people would rather choose when to read.

Spencer Matthews says he had big problems with alcohol. He was, by his own account, a very heavy drinker — he talks about a bar bill at the end of one television show that came to most of his fee, and about paying for everything so that people would keep drinking with him. He started drinking regularly at around fifteen. His brother had died on Everest when Spencer was ten, and he says some therapists believe his drinking was, at least in part, trauma he had never processed. He is openly unsure about that. He says he was always slightly uncomfortable putting the two things together, because he enjoyed drinking to excess and nobody made him do it. Both halves are his, and this page leaves them where he left them. He describes his years on Made in Chelsea as a stretch of hitting self-destruct on purpose, partly to dramatise things, and says he now talks about that man as a former self he has nothing in common with. The drinking was worst, he says, when he was bored — between television jobs, waiting for something to land rather than going after it. He stopped for a fortnight before the final of a televised ski jumping show, because he wanted to win. Then he stopped properly. He says that was initially for the woman he later married — not at her request, but because he could see the relationship slipping and could see her losing interest if he did not change something about his own health. He says it became for him almost immediately, and that he had no idea what it would do to the rest of his life. He drinks now, a great deal less. Asked directly whether a person can go from drinking heavily to drinking moderately, he does not offer it as a method. He says that with what he calls an addictive nature it is a slippery slope and always will be, and that what is different now is the size of what he would lose: a business, a marriage, and children who have never seen him drunk. He founded a non-alcoholic drinks company in 2018, and describes falling head over heels into it instead. That is worth knowing while reading the rest: he has a commercial interest in people drinking less, and this page has no connection to it. Nothing here is medical advice. His account of cutting down rather than stopping is his own, and is not being put forward as a route anyone else should take. The NHS says it can be very dangerous to stop drinking suddenly if you are dependent on alcohol. There is help at the end of this page, and none of it costs anything.

• Alcohol use disorder