Matthew Perry, Jackie O and what we want from "celebrity addicts".

"Hi, my name is Matthew… My friends call me Matty. And I should be dead."

This is how Matthew Perry's book, Friends, Lovers & The Big Terrible Thing opens. It was released in 2022. One year later, at exactly this time last year, he died.

An overdose of illegally-supplied ketamine was the official cause. Forty years of fighting an addiction that had cost Perry his mental health, his teeth, his colon, many central relationships, his reputation and career was the reason.

Watch: The final scene of the TV show, Friends where Matthew Perry starred as Chandler Bing. Post continues after video.

We know this, because he wrote about all of it in blistering, unflinching detail in that book. He also wrote about how many times he had tried to recover, and how much actual money it had cost him.

"I've probably spent $9 million or something trying to get sober," he told the New York Times in a piece to promote the memoir.

Nine million American dollars.

For Matthew Perry, it still wasn't enough.

One year on and a world away from the Pacific Palisades hot tub where Perry — beloved to multiple generations as Friends' Chandler Bing — passed away, a very different kind of celebrity is writing about addiction in her own memoir. Last Thursday morning, Jackie 'O' Henderson told the enormous audience of breakfast radio's Kyle & Jackie O Show that almost two years ago, she sought treatment for an opioid pill and alcohol addiction.

"I was averaging about 24 Panadeine Forte painkillers a day and then I was averaging about 10 to 12 Stilnox [sleeping tablets] a day," she said, explaining the story people could read in full for the first time in her memoir, The Whole Truth. "Someone was watching over me, because I don't know how I woke up most days with that kind of dosage."

The addiction cost her, Henderson said, her health, happiness and social life. Now everyone wants to talk about how much money it cost her, too.

They want her to recognise the "privilege" of having access to a stint at the Betty Ford Clinic, something that she now credits with saving her life.

And it is a privilege. Drug and alcohol treatment in Australia (and even more so in America, it must be said) is difficult to access publicly, and prohibitively expensive to access privately. All mental health treatment is. Funding of those sectors has not kept pace with an ever-increasing demand that the pandemic exacerbated.

And of course, it is a privilege to be able to stop working and earning for a few months to access world-class experts to help break this particularly deadly cycle. None of this is available to everyone, something Henderson is acknowledging with her decision to donate all profits from The Whole Truth to Odyssey House, a private, not-for-profit rehab centre in NSW.

But once acknowledged, what then? Would we rather that a person as high-profile as Jackie O had NOT shared her story of addiction? That she had been silenced by the shame that comes with saying out loud, 'I was helpless against this. I needed to be saved,' because she is inarguably rich?

Her words will have touched and changed people who needed to hear them, right now. Women, in particular, who might be projecting that they have it all together — 'look at me parenting, working, smiling, living like a successful human' — while they privately slave to substances keeping them small, afraid, sick and on the edge of calamity.

This week, Matthew Perry's family gave an interview. They were talking about their son, stepson, brother, who became one of the most famous men in the world, and who no amount of money could save.

"He was always very lonely in his soul," his mother Suzanne said. "I'm a very lucky woman, but there was one glitch; there was one problem. I couldn't conquer it. I couldn't help him."

It's a despair, frustration and devastating truth familiar to any loved one of someone grappling with addiction.

"What he taught the world is that no amount of money will cure an addict," Perry's stepfather Keith Morrison added.

Jackie O now credits her best friend and manager Gemma O'Neill with saving her life. She was the one who finally intervened after the symptoms of her friend's addiction became too hard to dismiss. She was the one who organised the rehab stay, the travel to get there, the timings and the necessary paparazzi evasion.

Listen to Mamamia Out Loud where we discuss Jackie O's viral and very vulnerable moment. Post continues after audio.

All of that is 'privilege' too, of course, but what do we want from our "celebrity addicts"? Do they only deserve our respect and empathy if their addiction proves fatal, rather than while they're showing us what recovery can look like, in real time? Explaining how a brave intervention may have diverted disaster? Offering up their stories and struggles as a mirror, a guide?

Matthew Perry's family now runs a foundation in his name that provides in and out-patient care for addicts, as well as financial support for expert organisations to work in communities wrestling with the problem at scale.

It's a legacy for their beloved "Matty", whose death was a shock, but not a surprise.

"There was an inevitability to what was going to happen next to him and he felt it very strongly," his mum Suzanne said. "But he said, 'I'm not frightened any more.'"

Before a trajectory becomes so very hopeless, surely anyone who's raising their hand — for help for themselves, and to help others — deserves the respect of not being shouted down for doing it.

Fame and wealth and profile puts you under a microscope while handing you a megaphone. Matthew Perry used his. It didn't save him, but he was determined that it might save others. Jackie O has a fighting chance of doing both.

If this story has raised issues about your own or others' drug and alcohol use, please contact Counselling Online for free confidential counselling or call the National Alcohol and Other Drug Hotline on 1800 250 015.

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Feature image: Getty/PEOPLE/Mamamia.