Mental Health and Drug Use in Kitchens

The Loop Nobody Talks About

TL;DR: Mental health and drug use in kitchens are not accidents. The industry attracts people in crisis, offers structure without scrutiny, then normalises drinking and substance use as part of the job. The loop feeds itself. And the people best placed to break it are often the ones with the most complicated reasons not to.

I have worked with enough chefs over enough years to know that this conversation makes people uncomfortable. Not because it isn’t true. Because it is.

The kitchen pulls in a particular kind of person. Not always, but often enough that it stops being coincidence: someone who needed work quickly, who didn’t fit well elsewhere, or who found that the noise and pace of service was the only thing loud enough to drown out whatever was going on inside their head. The kitchen doesn’t ask about any of that. It asks whether you can keep up.

For someone whose life outside those four walls is a mess, that’s genuinely appealing. Structure without scrutiny. Belonging without disclosure. You do the work, you earn your place. Simple. (Possibly the only simple thing about the whole business.)

The problem is that the same environment offering that stability also normalises the behaviours that make the original problem worse. Drinking after service isn’t incidental. It’s woven into the rhythm of the job. The shift ends. The adrenaline doesn’t. And the fastest way to come down is the bottle that appears on the pass before the last covers have left the room.

The Loop Nobody Names

Here’s how it works. Someone arrives in the kitchen already carrying something — anxiety, a history they haven’t dealt with, a low-grade depression they’ve never had a name for. The kitchen gives them purpose and community. It also gives them access to a culture where substance use is ordinary, where working through pain is read as character, and where asking for help is quietly filed under weakness.

The thing that initially helped them cope becomes the thing that makes the original problem harder to treat.

I knew a chef — good cook, meticulous, the sort who’d restock his section at the end of a double shift before anyone asked him to — who didn’t realise he had a drinking problem for three years. Not because he was in denial. Because every single person around him was drinking the same amount. The reference point was broken. The environment had quietly redefined normal, and he had no way of seeing it from inside.

Stimulants to push through the double. Alcohol to switch off. Cannabis to sleep. Back in at seven. The body adapts. The tolerance rises. Nobody comments on it because two sections over, the same thing is happening. That’s not weakness. That’s arithmetic.

What the Industry Actually Rewards

The restaurant industry says it values resilience. What it actually rewards, in practice, is the performance of being fine. Turning up when you shouldn’t. Taking on the extra shift when you’re already running on nothing. Laughing off the things that shouldn’t be funny.

Kitchens do build genuine resilience — I won’t pretend otherwise. They teach you to solve problems fast, stay calm when everything is going sideways, and work as a team under conditions that would dissolve most offices by lunchtime. Those are real skills. But they’re being built in an environment that also has a habit of burning through people and calling it character development.

There’s a harder truth in here that the industry rarely says out loud. The people running kitchens — the experienced ones, the ones who could actually change the culture — are usually survivors of it. They came through the same hours, the same drinking, the same atmosphere of just get on with it. And some part of their professional identity is built on having survived that. Dismantling it means, in some small way, questioning the conditions that made them. That’s not a comfortable thing to sit with, and it’s one of the real reasons why cultural change in kitchens is so much slower than the wellbeing articles suggest.

The Structural Problems

Split shifts make it nearly impossible to maintain any kind of routine outside work. Therapy appointments, exercise, sleep, a vague stab at a social life: all of it becomes logistically difficult when you’re working 11am to 3pm and back in from 6pm until midnight. The hours aren’t a side effect. They are the job.

Pay is the other piece. A significant portion of kitchen workers, particularly in the middle and lower tiers, are paid at or near minimum wage. Financial stress is one of the clearest predictors of poor mental health and increased substance use. Add unsociable hours, physical exhaustion, and a cultural norm of using substances to regulate your mood, and the outcome isn’t difficult to explain.

The industry’s response to this is often mindfulness apps and a decent staff meal. These aren’t nothing. But they don’t address the conditions creating the problem, any more than a plaster addresses a burst pipe.

Why Change Is Actually Difficult

The chefs who break the loop tend to do so because something external forces a pause. An injury. A relationship ending. A moment of clarity at 4am when the maths stops adding up. Very rarely because the industry provided them with the support to address it before it got to that point.

That tells you something. The industry is not set up to catch people before they fall. It’s set up to replace them. There’s always another eager eighteen-year-old willing to work the hours and absorb the culture without questioning it. The supply doesn’t run out, so the pressure to change conditions never quite reaches the point where it becomes unavoidable.

A genuine response wouldn’t start with a wellbeing poster and a helpline number on the staff noticeboard. It would start with an honest look at what the kitchen is actually asking of people, and whether those asking have the authority and the will to change it. It means paying people enough that financial stress isn’t a permanent background noise. It means designing shift patterns that leave room for sleep. It means treating a request for reduced hours as a reasonable professional conversation rather than a sign that someone can’t hack it.

Some kitchens are doing versions of this already. The evidence from those places is that the food doesn’t suffer, the turnover drops, and the people working there aren’t burning out at 32. It isn’t impossible. It just requires the people in charge to be willing to question an inheritance they’ve spent twenty years earning the right to pass on.

That’s the harder ask. And it’s the one the industry keeps not quite getting around to.