Jacob Young has spoken publicly for the first time about a seven-year opioid addiction that began with a routine dental prescription and spiralled in secret, hidden even from his own wife.

The General Hospital actor, 46, made the revelation on the Imperfectly Perfect Podcast, tracing the roots of his substance use back to a difficult childhood and describing how addiction eventually took hold of a significant portion of his adult life. 

“I went through seven years of my life, wasted on opioids, still trying to figure out what was wrong with me, but I didn’t know,” he said. 

“It was just needing to numb… It was the only thing that made me feel normal.”

The opioids came into his life through an unexpected route. 

After he and his wife Christen Steward had bought a house and settled in together, Young underwent dental surgery and was prescribed Vicodin.

Apart from having his wisdom teeth out as a teenager, he had never taken opioids before. What followed was years of dependency that he kept entirely to himself.

Young’s history with substances had begun much earlier, though. 

He started smoking marijuana around the age of 14, and it wasn’t until his mid-20s, when fame from roles on All My Children, General Hospital and The Bold and the Beautiful brought him into the orbit of New York City’s nightlife, that drinking and cocaine use entered the picture. 

By the time he married, he had largely left those behind. The opioids were a different story.

He eventually sat his wife down and told her the truth, a conversation he credits as the turning point. From there, he sought counselling and medical support to work through his dependency.

Looking back, Young connects his substance use to a childhood defined by instability. 

His parents divorced and he was shuffled between them in a way that left him unsettled. The family relied on welfare and food stamps, and Young grew up alongside three older siblings in what he described as a humble upbringing. 

In his adolescence, he went to live with his father, which felt stable, until his stepmother, who had become like a second mother to him, died by suicide. 

His relationship with his father broke down in the aftermath, and a difficult relationship with his mother at the time left him without a reliable parental figure during some of his most formative years.

“I was going through stuff that I didn’t realise that I was ever going to go through, emotionally,” he said, a quiet acknowledgement of just how much had been buried, long before the prescriptions began.