Sedated

A Tragic Story that Starts with a Prescription from a Doctor. It was early one spring morning that Britt Doyle received the terrible news that his ex-wife Wynne had been found dead in her bed-and worse, his young son had been the one to find her. Wynne Doyle seemed to have it all-wealth, education, a successful marriage, and a beautiful family. She had the talent and energy to succeed at any project she took on, from serving on a charity board to renovating her San Francisco home. But underneath a façade of confidence and well-being, she was struggling with addiction to prescription opiates and alcohol. Over time, her husband became an expert at finding hidden pills and liquor bottles-in her shoes, under the mattresses, in the pockets of coats hanging in the back of the closet, even inside containers of rice in the pantry. Her children survived by learning to read her every mood. But their strategies were futile in the face of Wynne's slow descent into illness-a decades-long cycle of hospitalizations, treatments, and relapses that finally came to an abrupt end that spring night in 2015. Both a memoir and a mea culpa, Sedated recounts the unraveling of a life that once was filled with promise, and a family's frantic efforts to prevent the inevitable. This unsentimental remembrance reveals intimate details behind this private tragedy-because we all need to know and share our experiences if we want to come to grips with the heartbreaking and humbling national epidemic of opiate addiction.