“It’s very funny to be doing this with an audience. It’s a familiar mode for me, as I spend a lot of time in therapy!”

Sam Lansky is having a rough time. The journalist and author of The Gilded Razor is struggling to keep his mental/emotional health in order amid what feels like a never-ending quarantine and unrestful social climate. But that’s nothing new to him—as a recovering drug addict, it’s normal to feel like things are out of sorts.

Lansky recently chatted with Drew Ramsey, MD on Instagram Live to discuss his new novel Broken People, and how the pandemic can take its toll on those who struggle with mental health and addiction issues. “I think it’s an incredibly challenging time for anyone who struggles with mental health,” he says. “I think the pandemic has laid bare so much about things that are broken or wrong in society.”

One thing the author emphasized during the chat is how depression and anxiety is now part of the everyday norm, and even he is trying to resolve those negative feelings within himself. “Who isn’t depressed?” he says. “Everything went away overnight! That’s not revelatory… I think it’s okay to look at the way we’re feeling right now and say this is circumstantial and a reaction to a really dramatic shift in the world that we’re all struggling to move through.”

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With those negative feelings can come urges to reach for tempting addictions and vices (which could be alcohol, drugs, etc.), which Lansky feels can come from the lack of physical connection that society was once so entrenched and nourished with on an everyday basis. “At twelve years in [sobriety], I feel that!” he says, reading the comments on his Instagram live stream. “My weekends are torture. I’m like, ‘what am I doing with myself?’ It’s really challenging.”

But Lansky found a way to make the challenge a part of his recovery. To make up for the lack of interpersonal relationships, he’s found himself taking a more inward approach, meditating and reading excerpts from Mark Nepo’s The Book of Awakening to gain a better understanding of not only the current global status, but to find inner peace that he might have found to be missing prior to the pandemic.

Sam Lansky

But if there’s anything Lansky learned throughout his time in recovery that could be applicable to the current public health situation, it’s that no one should ever hesitate to reach out to loved ones when they’re feeling down.

“The only thing I’ve done right 100 percent of the time is I always pick up the phone,” he says. “If I feel it and it doesn’t feel good, or it feels complicated… I just pick up the phone, and that has been the most vital thing I’ve done in my recovery. I believe we are only as sick as our secrets, and there’s something profoundly liberating to unburden yourself of whatever you are carrying—I really believe that in my [bone] marrow.”

Lansky’s new novel, Broken People, comes out on June 9, 2020.

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