Matthew Perry’s life is being remembered in a three-part documentary series by the people who knew him best, including his sister Mia Perry Bowick.
“Yes, he was just that wonderful,” Bowick said during an appearance on TODAY Oct. 26. “All of those warm, comforting feelings you get from him, he gave them to his family and friends.”
The “Friends” star died of acute effects of ketamine at 54 in October 2023. Perry had been open about his decadeslong struggle with addiction. He estimated in his memoir, which published one year before his death, that he spent $7 million on efforts to get sober.
Bowick said in the documentary, out Oct. 27 on Netflix, that her brother’s struggle impacted her career path. She became a licensed psychotherapist working in substance use treatment.
Bowick said when Perry first started telling people about addiction, there was “very little nuance or understanding about what substance use disorder is.”
“I only had information from the D.A.R.E. program. It’s kind of very black and white — if you use a drug, you’re going to die,” she said.
Bowick said she wished she understood at the time “it was a disease.”
“When you can think of it from the disease perspective, it’s a lot easier to understand why they can’t stop, and it’s helpful for the families to not take it as personally that they can’t stop,” she said.
“As we learned more and more about what’s happening to him, it was easier to love him through it, rather than try to control what was happening,” she added.
Perry wrote in his memoir that he had a near death experience in 2019 after his colon burst from opioid overuse. He also said his heart stopped at a rehab facility in Switzerland.
Perry had been receiving ketamine infusion therapy before his death “to ease pain and help with depression,” he wrote in his memoir. According to an autopsy, his last ketamine infusion therapy treatment had been a week and a half before his death, which could not have been the ketamine in his system when he died.
Five individuals, including Perry’s assistant Kenneth Iwamasa and Jasveen Sangha, nicknamed the “Ketamine Queen, were charged in connection with Perry’s fatal drug overdose, per a press release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Central District of California. Prosecutors alleged their roles in distributing ketamine to Perry caused his death.
Prosecutors said Perry was experiencing severe ketamine addiction and was injecting the drug six to eight times a day before his death. The actor sought out unsupervised doses and developed an “out of control” dependence on it, prosecutors said.
If you or someone you know is struggling with an alcohol, drug or other substance use problem, call the free and confidential helpline of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration at 1-800-662-HELP (1-800-662-4357), or visit findtreatment.gov.