Darren McGarvey's Addictions - Season 1

Darren McGarvey explores Scotland's dangerous love affair with alcohol.

At the liver unit in Dumfries and Galloway Royal Infirmary, Darren shadows Dr Mathis Heydtmann to see first hand how Scotland's obsession with alcohol is causing us deadly harm.

In Dundee, he meets psychologist Suzanne Zeedyk to confront his own battles with alcohol and try to understand his problematic relationship with it. He also talks to historian Thora Hands to discover whether Scotland has always been a nation of hard drinkers.

Darren then volunteers himself for an experiment to determine whether he has an unconscious bias towards alcohol-related images, before meeting Dr Richard Purves to learn some of the advertising tricks that encourage us to buy alcohol.

In Edinburgh, he asks Michael, whose excessive drinking led to a liver transplant, why people from the LGBTQ+ community statistically drink more than the rest of the population. And he visits a liver clinic in Stirling to find out whether his own past heavy drinking has done permanent damage to his body.

Darren meets a grieving father who believes his son's death from an alcohol-related seizure could have been avoided if the appropriate support services had been in place, and, in Edinburgh, he visits the only NHS residential rehab facility in Scotland.

Darren uncovers why Scotland has the highest drug-related death rate in Europe.

He begins his journey on the front line of the drug crisis by spending a shift with the ambulance service during a busy Friday evening in Glasgow. He then travels to Fife, where he is trained to use Naloxone, a life-saving treatment that reverses the effects of an opioid overdose, and meets Reece who has been saved by the treatment twice.

Darren revisitis his time in rehab in 2018, returning to talk with the therapist who aided his recovery, before visiting neuroscientist Dr Lucy Troup to learn exactly what happens inside the brain when drugs are taken. Historian Dr Jim Mills walks him through a potted history of drugs in Scotland since 1575 and shines a light on how drug addiction evolved from a medical issue to a criminal one.

In Govan, Darren meets former police officer Simon Maclean, who, after years working undercover as a drug dealer, now thinks a radical overhaul of Scotland's drugs laws is needed. Taking a trip inside Barlinnie Prison, Darren meets some of the prisoners to learn about the role addiction plays in so many crimes, and how our current system fails to address this.

Darren then spends a day at the Simon Community Access Hub where he meets former heroin users Kevin and Alex, who explain how the charity helped their recovery. He also meets Jim, a former heroin user who became a staff member at the hub and who now uses a revolutionary scanner to show intravenous drug users how to safely inject drugs and where to seek support.

Darren then meets Dr Saket Priyadarshi, the clinical lead for Glasgow's alcohol and drug recovery services, to find out why there are so many methadone users in Scotland and what the alternatives are, before heading to the banks of the River Ayr to discover a rehab model that is changing the recovery landscape.

How can you be addicted to a behaviour? What happens when you remove the chemical hooks of drugs and alcohol? Darren attempts to answer these questions by going back to where it all started for him: food. He meets Annemarie, who despite beating addictions to drugs and alcohol still struggles with food, and learns that for many, food is simply another way of coping with trauma. But in a world where fast food is big business, it can be hard to avoid. Darren meets food scientist Dr David Gally to find out exactly why the drive-thru and the chocolate aisle are so hard to resist.

In Livingston, Darren meets Aidan who is in therapy for porn addiction, and has a sit down with psychosexual therapist Pauline Brown to try to understand why sex addictions are on the increase.

Darren learns that our obsession with screens has led not only to a rise in pornography use but in our gambling habits. He meets social scientist Heather Wardle to chart how ‘having a flutter' has changed over the last hundred years, and joins a march across Scotland with The Big Step as they try to get gambling adverts kicked out of football.

With gambling mechanisms now a normal part of many video games, Darren meets Jonny who spent thousands of pounds on ‘loot boxes' as a teenager. But it's not all bad news as Darren takes to his games console to meet Joe Donnelly, a gamer who found community and therapy amongst the hills of Grand Theft Auto, and in the finale of the series, Darren learns that the opposite of addiction is connection as he joins Govan charity GalGael for their community meal.