Darren McGarvey's Addictions

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.