Michael J. Fox Started Drinking Heavily After Parkinson’s Diagnosis [Video]

Michael J. Fox said he started drinking to cope with his Parkinson’s diagnosis.

The 52-year-old started showing symptoms of Parkinson’s in 1990 while filming Doc Hollywood, but wasn’t properly diagnosed until the following year when he was 29. Fox didn’t go public with his diagnosis until 1998, but has been a staunch advocate of Parkinson’s disease research ever since.

Fox told Howard Stern that he dealt with his disease by drinking more than he had in the past.

“My first reaction to it was to start drinking heavily,” he told Stern on his Sirius XM show Wednesday. “I used to drink to party, but now I was drinking alone and to just not be [present]. Every day.”

Fox added, “Once I did that it was then about a year of like a knife fight in a closet, where I just didn’t have my tools to deal with it.”

Fox said that it was his wife, Tracy Pollan, who helped him put his life back together. He said she looked at him one day and asked, “Is this what you want?”

It wasn’t.

Fox started going to AA meetings and going to therapy, and things started to improve.

“Then after that, I went into therapy and it all started to get really clear to me,” he said. He also said he started to learn to take things one day at a time.

“And then everything started to really turn the other way. My marriage got great, and my career.”

Michael J. Fox makes his return to television September 26 with the Michael J. Fox Show. The series, which also stars Breaking Bad‘s Betsy Brandt, is his first lead role since Spin City.

As previously reported by The Inquisitr, Fox said he felt his Parkinson’s disease made him a better actor, because it gave his performances more “gravitas.” He also said that it forced him out of his comfort zone.

“I had a certain fluidity to my movements and rhythm of speech and a physicality that I had depended on,” he said. “It served me really well, but when that was taken away, I found that there was other stuff that I could use.”