Davinia Taylor: If we can send billionaires to space, we can take a better look at addiction

Davinia Taylor was once a regular in the tabloids as an actor, presenter and member of the notorious Primrose Hill Set. But behind the glamorous scenes of partying was someone battling addiction.

"I couldn't tell you how much I was drinking at the end... Three, four, five bottles a day? At the end, you lost track. But I remember I'd wake up in the middle of the night, say it's four in the morning, and I'd have to reach for alcohol because the detox was waking me up."

Speaking to Bryony Gordon's Mad World podcast for a special series over Addiction Awareness Week (listen using the audio player above), Davinia now wants to push the conversation to more joined up care for addicts across different services.

"People don't talk about addiction, because people still dare not touch mental health. It's still this guarded taboo. But if we put alcoholism in a category of 'Somebody has a certain predisposition and guess what, it's in their genetic code', would we then accept it?"

"I think science needs to pull together and instead of having one section look at the gut, one section look at the brain, one section look at mental health, one section look at addiction, we just say hang on, it's all linked. This is one living organism, it's about time that's how it was treated. I mean, if we can send two billionaires to space, I think we can take some time to look at addiction!"

Listen to the new series of our mental health podcast, Bryony Gordon's Mad World, marking Addiction Awareness Week, to hear to hear how Davinia overcame alcoholic seizures and why she thinks "everything in moderation" is nonsense. Use the audio player at the top of this article, or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your preferred podcast app.