Jon Hamm details stint in rehab for alcohol addiction

“Mad Men” star Jon Hamm, who has spoken only rarely of his stint in rehab early this year to combat alcohol addiction, on Thursday gave details of life inside the facility.

“[Rehab] has all these connotations, but it’s just an extended period of talking about yourself,” the Emmy-winning actor, 45, told the online magazine The Journal, published by the men’s fashion website MrPorter.com. “People go for all sorts of reasons, not all of which are chemically related. But there’s something to be said for pulling yourself out of the grind for a period of time and concentrating on recalibrating the system. And it works. It’s great.”

Hamm’s representative said on March 24 that the actor, who played the hard-drinking 1960s ad man Don Draper, “recently completed treatment for his struggle with alcohol addiction” at what the newspaper New Canaan Advertiser said was Silver Hill Hospital in New Canaan, Connecticut.

Parental issues, Hamm believes, contributed to the addiction. He was 2 when his parents divorced and 10 when his mother, Deborah, died of stomach cancer. His father, Daniel, Hamm recalled, “could talk to anyone. He was a great listener and he knew a little bit about a lot of things. I aspired to be like that.” Yet his dad left most of Jon’s upbringing in the hands of friends’ mothers and died when his son was 20.

“After I’d lost my dad,” Hamm told The Journal, “I had this horrible paralyzing inertia — and no one in my family was capable of dealing with it. So what do you do? Go and see a professional. I preach it from the mountaintops. I know it’s a luxury and it’s not something everyone can afford. But if you can, do it. It’s like a mental gym.”