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Randy Brooke/WireImageDarryl “DMC” McDaniels is opening up about his battle with alcohol and depression – and how meeting his mother saved his life in his new memoir, Ten Ways Not to Commit Suicide.
In an interview with People Magazine, the Queens emcee reveals that he started drinking as a youth and eventually needed alcohol to get through his stage performances.
“I started from drinking a 40[-ounce bottle Olde English 800] throughout the day, right before I would go on stage,” he explains. “So that’s when it got obsessive. It got to the point where it was five 40s before I went onstage, but it still didn’t take effect.”
Unfortunately for McDaniels, his addiction to alcohol eventually led him to the hospital with acute pancreatitis.
“I was in the hospital for like a month and a half, with everything entered [through the] vein because I couldn’t take anything orally…You’ve got two choices: Drink and die, or not drink and live.”
After years of battling alcohol, depression and thoughts of suicide, McDaniels credits his recovery to finding his biological mother.
“It was the missing piece to my identity. When I was at my depressed, alcoholic, suicidal lowest, it was almost like the gods up in heaven said, ‘Yo, we gotta tell him right now because he’s about to kill himself,'” he says.
Now McDaniels is on a new mission: to help mentor and foster adoptive kids. “My destiny was to be kept [by my foster parents] so I could meet Run, so I could do all this, so I could go back and talk to all the other foster kids and adopted kids and all the potentially suicidal kids and all the alcoholics.”
McDaniels’ memoir Ten Ways Not to Commit Suicide is out July 5th.
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