John Stamos Says His Therapist Saved His Life By ‘Helping Me Get Sober’
John Stamos got candid about battling alcoholism and how his therapist, Phil Stutz, saved his life when it came to achieving sobriety.
“I probably wouldn’t be here [without him],” the Fuller House alum, 60, told Page Six on Tuesday, July 16, adding that he has been seeing the counselor for “close to 20 years.”
“He was big into helping me get sober,” Stamos continued. “When I went to Stutz one of the first times, he said, ‘You know if you weren’t so f–king stupid you’d realize how good you have it,’ and I was like, ‘You’re right,'” he added.
Stamos revealed that he loved therapy so much that he introduced his late friend and Full House costar Bob Saget to Stutz. Saget died in January 2022 at the age of 65 in an Orlando hotel room due to a blunt head trauma.
“[Bob] was a bit of a … He drove me crazy [when we first met] and I said, ‘You gotta go into therapy if you want to be friends with me,’ so he went to Stutz and Stutz helped him too” Stamos explained.
In his 2023 memoir, If You Would Have Told Me, the General Hospital alum noted that he suffered from alcoholism throughout his life and discussed his June 2015 DUI arrest.
Following the book’s release, he told People that he “never sobered up” after getting his DUI. “When I did get the DUI … I came home from the hospital that night, I sat down, I drank a bottle of wine just to forget what just happened,” Stamos wrote of the incident.
“When you sober up, you have to look at the ugly truth, so you keep drinking,” he said, divulging that shortly after his arrest, he went straight to film My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2. “I was kind of just loosely buzzed through the shooting of that movie.”
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After his DUI, he pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor of driving under the influence and was sentenced to three years probation.
Stamos said the mistake was a wakeup call for him, and “changed everything” for him. In October 2023, Stamos looked back on the arrest on the “Sunday Sitdown with Willie Geist” podcast. “I got in my car like a fool, and I was not sober. I was driving around Beverly Hills,” Stamos sighed. “And looking back at it I was like, ‘Oh my God, I could’ve killed somebody. Horrible day.'”
