Season 4, Episode 8
John T.
Age: Late 20’s
Location: Arizona
Addiction: Alcohol, hallucinogens
What’s Memorable: His sad, desperate attempts to get his supposed friends to hang out with him.
Update: John died in January 2013 – suicide. Obituary
Official synopsis: As a former clean-cut track star, John’s life used to revolve around athletics. Now, after a leg injury ended his running career, John spends his time abusing his body with alcohol, marijuana, ecstasy and hallucinogenic drugs. He believes he is living a charmed life as a successful and popular DJ when the reality is that he is losing his friends, his family and his chance at success in the music industry to an addiction that could result in permanent brain damage or death. His family believes that his only hope lies in an intervention, but can they convince him that he has a problem before it is too late?
Original Air Date: February 2008
Interventionist: Jeff
I remember John talking about the twelve steps and after going through each number he did a step to get a beer out of the fridge and step 12 was popping the can. That was followed by laughter. You have to want to get better.
How about you stop hotlinking and just upload the pictures to either your site or a image hosting site such as imgur. A&E has removed all the images you hotlinked and now I can’t see any of the people’s pictures you’ve posted.
Yeah well when I made this site I didn’t know the images wouldn’t exist after a while. Now in order to get pics for all the ones missing I have to watch the episodes and take screenshots, which I have done for many, many of them but watching every single episode again is a pretty big project that I don’t really have time for right now. I AM SO SORRY BOB.
Thanks for trying Dizzy.
Thank you for trying . I enjoy what you have done here and know you have obviously worked very hard on this site . I find this is the best way to keep up with Intervention and updates other than their FB Page . I try to avoid the FB page though because it gets ugly real fast .
Without this I would have never known my dear, old friend had died. He was lost and confused. He was mentally unwell. We begged his parents for help on their doorstep in 2005. 2005. Begged. They turned us away and sent him away to ny for 2 months. This episode and his parents misrepresent him. He was a crazy, hot mess, but he was a beautiful soul. People shouldn’t speak on a persons character they don’t know.
I remember him from some years ago in Phoenix when I would go out to bars and nightclubs. I first started encountering him a couple years before his intervention episode aired. He had an extremely negative, unstable, bad vibe. People all called him Dr.Doom, his DJ name, he did not want to be called anything else. He never got gigs to play anywhere, but was always inviting people back to his apartment to party. I don’t know anyone that went. He always had an enormous array of drugs in his pocket to choose from, to sell. Then one night I was watching intervention and he came on. I had no idea the complexity of his character. His dark vibes and instability came through in the show, but I felt so much more compassion for him after seeing how desperately depressed he was. No one I knew ever knew he had a child, or that he never worked. I think he had nothing to live for because he never did anything positive for himself. His mom was just trying to take care of him, but she made it worse by not forcing him to actually have a job, instead of his fantasy that he would be a famous DJ. So some time passed, everyone knew Dr.Doom had been on intervention, and I probably saw him in person a couple times after that. It was in a new light, though I did not want to befriend him. Someone texted me at some point and said he had committed suicide and left a message on facebook that this is truly what he wanted. Indeed it was there when I sought out his page. Within a day or two someone logged in and changed his page from “Dr.Doom” to John Tyrrell and wiped away all things he had left on there and turned it into a sort of clean slate. Even his last messages. That is sad in itself. They couldn’t even let him leave his own messages in the world.
Wow. Thanks so much for your comment. I didn’t realize he has committed suicide. His whole story is so sad.
How is it that we humans (often) have such difficulty facing truth and understanding love? How, when we become addicted (and I am a recovering addict)is it so difficult to admit to ourselves the reality? And why is it so difficult for many of us parents (and I am also a parent, a pretty faulty one)to take the hard line with our children, which, when taken with emotional equanimity, is the most loving and ultimately nurturing behavior? I know for myself that sometimes I was too tired or too overwhelmed to react to my childrens’ misbehavior in the best or effective way. And I still ‘bail them out’ in some situations when I probably shouldn’t. And yes, I know that my intention is to ‘save’ them the pain or difficulty that comes when there is fallout when they have made a mistake, and though intellectually I know that ‘no pain, no gain’ is true, it still hurts to see them hurt. A mother’s (and sometimes a father’s)basic instinct is to protect her children. But we have to learn to get past that when our protective instinct actually ends up stunting their growth. I am still trying to learn that.
It’s so sad that John’s mother didn’t learn it in time. We, as a culture, are trying to learn how to do better parenting, but there is never going to be a ‘one size fits all’ method of good parenting, yet a few basics are true…one is that kids have to start learning from an early age how to do things for themselves, and I sense that John maybe had too much done for him, and it was likely out of love for him… we get our self-love and sense of self worth from a number of ways, and learning how to do things for ourselves, to be effective, is a very important one. I feel sadness for his poor mother, and even if she did make this mistake (though I am only guessing about this – I may be way off) it is not her fault. John made his own choices. I do hope that he has found peace.
While i agree with 95% percent of your comment, I’m not sure why you put (and some men’s too,) when talking about the basic instinct parents have for their children. Although some people do dispute this, I agree that mother’s have a stronger bond to their children for a couple reason that are pretty obvious. The first being that women carry the child in their womb for 9 months. You are obviously with the child 24/7 for 9 months. The child is apart of you literally. Second, biologically women are more emotional and caring so clearly their would be a strong instict to protect your child. However, none of this means that it’s not still normally a basic instict of men to protect our children. In fact that is mainly what fathert’s are known for is being the protector. I’m not sure if that father of your child is a dead beat or what but i can assure you it’s generally just as much an instict for us to care and protect for our children as well. I feel like what you were saying is ALL women protect there children, but only a couple men do and that’s not anywhere close to being accurate. Some men are the primary care takers and protectors of their children because the mother has a ran off and wants nothing to do with the child. so just because some people are heartless does not mean there is any less of an instinct toward child from either parent
His family loved him very much and shut down his FB page before any more morons could post hateful hurtful comments. He was a kind and loving person who struggled for years.
If you think he was kind and loving, you only saw one side of him and didn’t know him as MANY others did. I first met him in 2005, and would periodically encounter him at different events up until he killed himself. Literally EVERY encounter I had with him was negative, although he didn’t turn on me until the last few years, despite the fact that I tried to reach out and help him, but he was a lost cause. Regardless, the TRUTH that his family and few friends continue to deny is that he was mentally unstable, he was completely delusional, and he was abusive and violent.
Thank you so much for taking the time to create this site and for updating it as you do. I appreciate being able to find out what has happened to some of the people that, after watching their episode of Intervention, we feel that we know. I think we all care about what has happened to them and how they are doing after their interventions. Thank you.
This guy had friends, a bunch of them.
No one wanted to be on camera.
Shame on you A&E and also the webmaster of this site for immortalizing him in this fashion.
This is despicable.
A few fake, trash friends that were happy to take the drugs he bribed them with. They didn’t want to be on camera out of fear that they’d be exposed for using him. A&E and the webmaster barely scratched the surface of the monster that he was.
I’m in the UK and have just recently started watching Intervention and I’m grateful for this website as it allows me to follow-up on the participants, so thank you Dizzy.
I’m watching the episodes in order and just finished watching this one. I’m really sad to read John committed suicide.
I noticed something odd during his Intervention and I’m now questioning how genuinely these stories are portrayed and how much they are contrived and manipulated by producers. During the intervention the large earring in John’s left ear keeps appearing and disappearing. I noticed it was missing, then it was there, then missing again, then there again. I realised then it had been edited and manipulated to portray the intervention and John in a certain way and I feel cheated. I wonder how true the episode was to John’s life and sincerely pray the editing didn’t in any way add to John’s struggles or feelings of hopelessness he must’ve felt before he took his own life.
I lost an older brother to addiction a few years ago, I’m a recovering addict myself, and my younger brother has gone down the rabbit hole of addiction and I fear I’ll lose him too. We all suffered extremely violent and abusive upbringings and the show has given me a different view of addiction. I’ve managed to stop enabling my younger brother despite how it broke my heart. I cry for him every day and my nightmares and night terrors are mostly about losing him too.
Much love to all fellow addicts/recovering addicts out there.
i just finished watching this and I went back to see what you were talking about with john’s earring and WOW, you were SO right! he starts with both earrings, then there’s only one, then there’s none, then back to one, and then back to both…what the heck??? hmmmmmmmm…………………..
very sadly, i am now questioning intervention’s credibility. i’ve read a few other things in the past from past addicts from the show and/or their families that made me wonder.
I knew this guy when I lived in Phoenix, around 2006-2010. The first time I met him, I had gone out to a bar with a friend, and Doom approached. He seemed eager and nice enough, but then offered us some pills and wanted to go take them back at his bunker and play music for us. He lived an hour and a half away, and my friend told him that we couldn’t go. When Doom walked away, my friend told me that he was very troubled and had a bad reputation in the EDM scene for getting young kids high and drunk, and some other things I don’t remember anymore. I saw him many times after that, always at EDM events, he was always looking to book a gig, find an after party, get people to go to his apartment. The vibe was that he was a sensitive and troubled man, but that he was a lot older than the people he wanted to hang out with and always seemed to have a lot of drugs. I was sad when I saw him on intervention, the guy I saw on there was the same as the guy I saw in person for years.
And it is sad that his page is gone, it was a testament to what he wanted to leave for the world, and scrubbing it of his flaws is not protective, it’s creating a false narrative. Nobody was going to write anything bad there. I hope he has found his peace.
It is always interesting to hear insight from people who had encountered the person in real life, so thanks for posting.
I’m sorry to hear he committed suicide after he seemingly turned his life around and was on the path to becoming a substance use addiction counselor. However it is not too surprising- from what I saw it seems like he had narcissistic personality disorder, probably created or at least funneled by his treatment as “the first son born in 30 years in the family.” When narcissists are faced with the truth that they are not the center of everyone’s world that they had always believed, the result can be suicide as it is impossible to merge their world view with reality.
Crazy. I remembered him from the show watched long ago.
I am a long time friend of john from kindergarten until about college. He was an amazing talented guy, and a good guy. He got lost as many of us do and never found his way back. The man drugs turned him into was not him. If you’ve ever experienced addiction yourself or had a loved one who did then you’d get it. Judge not lest you be judged
can anyone please post a link to this episode? it’s not on the a&e app