Leo was addicted and thought: ‘I’m just lying here dying’

“The outside remained quite intact until the end: my armor, my mask. But my inside was as rotten as a medlar,” Leo says in the podcast Towards the Man. “That’s why I kept the exterior like that. So that the outside world could see what kind of big car I drove and what expensive suits I wore. I also believed that I had no problem.”

Until Leo was in bed non-stop for a few weeks in a row. “The last two weeks before I disappeared into the clinic, I lay alone in bed and drank alone. I was on a bottle of vodka a day at the time. And don’t eat, because I couldn’t keep anything down.” The business card of his former counselor from the SolutionS addiction clinic fell from the book Leo was reading at the time. “It was only then that I realized: Shit, this isn’t good. So I’m just lying here dying on the bed and I don’t see it myself. I shouldn’t have been admitted two weeks later, because then I wouldn’t have been there anymore.”

“I immediately called my counselor and said: ‘You’re right.’” Within two days, Leo was admitted to the clinic. That was in 2010. Shortly afterwards he started as an expert by experience at the SolutionS addiction clinic in Eindhoven. “From the clients Approximately 80% of those receiving treatment from us are men. In the self-help groups, the AA, the NA, those kinds of groups, about a quarter are women.”

At Novadic-Kentron addiction institution, roughly 75 percent of the clients are men. “Firstly, on average, men use alcohol and drugs more often and more than women. This of course increases the chance that they will develop a substance use disorder,” says Harmen Beurmanjer, addiction scientist at Novadic-Kentron.

“Biologically speaking, there are indications that men produce more dopamine after alcohol intake than women. As a result, men have more positive associations with alcohol than women.” It is socially more acceptable for men to drink a lot compared to women, says Beurmanjer. “Men may have more of the idea that they should drink like a man. We see this in the fact that men also drink more often out of social pressure than women.”

Experienced expert Leo thinks that men are more practical than women. “They may be more likely to choose one quick fix. Like: ‘I’m a bit sad: I pop a pill in, throw a glass in and the feeling goes away. I’m not going to talk about it with my wife because that’s for wimps. I’m not going to talk about it with my friends because we have to go to NAC tonight and that’s much more fun.’ In short: they simply avoid that.”

Looking back on his addiction, Leo mainly regrets it. “I regret how I treated my wife and my children. That hurts the most, because they are the closest to me. The rest of the family hardly noticed anything. My father always gave me a bottle of beer as a snack. I came to visit. ‘You don’t drink anymore?!’ ‘No dad, not for ten years.'”

In the podcast Op De Man Af, journalists Eva de Schipper and Evie Hendriks work their way through the man’s mind. They do this by having honest conversations with all kinds of different men, by questioning the men in their own lives and by looking critically at themselves. Reporter René Snippert helps the ladies by exploring the market for men and self-development.