Alcohol sales are up during the COVID-19 pandemic and self medicating is not a good idea according to someone who knows first hand.

Sean McCann is a former member of the band Great Big Sea and mental health advocate. He’s been in recovery for eight years and has recently released a memoir on his journey.

While on the NL Morning News, he said it’s not a good idea to mask your problems with liquor.

“All I can say is that, these are Band-Aid, they’re not cures,” he said. “They will not lead to recovery. They will not ultimately help. Alcohol is a depressant. You know, It’ll numb your pain and for me, in my personal experience, I used it to numb my pain for 35 years and all it left me with was a terrible hangover.”

He says with all this time on our hands, this could be an opportunity to take stock of our lives.

“I would advice you not to use and to try and take this time to live through it and maybe it’s the perfect time to really start to ask yourself why you need to drink so much in the first place. These are the first steps in helping yourself.”

“This might be a great time because, you know, we actually have the time not to self assess, to look inwards, if you try to look for the positive in this, we’re afforded more time now than we have in our busy lives in general, in any given day. So maybe this is the opportunity we need to sober up.”

McCann and his wife Andrea Aragon, have recently released a book called One Good Reason, A Memoir of Addiction and Recovery, Music and Love which is now available everywhere.