Full House alum Jodie Sweetin has elaborated on her past addiction struggle, saying it was all anyone wanted to talk about after someone sold the story of her being in treatment.

The Stephanie Tanner portrayer struggled with addiction in her 20s, as she said in a recent interview on Kail Lowry’s Barely Famous podcast. “And because people know who you are, it never kind of goes away from it being in the public eye,” she explained. “And also, anything that you go through because you’re in the public eye, people just want to pay attention to it, regardless of if it’s something that millions of other people are dealing with.”

Despite people assuming Sweetin’s drug and alcohol use was a result of her early fame, the actor said she would have struggled with addiction issues “regardless of being on TV or not.” In the middle-class neighborhood in which Sweetin grew up, five other young people “either went to jail for drugs” or “OD’d in their house” and “nobody knew about them,” she said.

“It happens all the time,” Sweetin observed. “It doesn’t have to be someone famous. This happens all the time.”

Furthermore, being a child star gave her resources to seek treatment. “But it’s hard, you know,” she admitted. “You have to make all your mistakes very publicly.”

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Sweetin said she was around 18 when she first got sober, and after ups and downs, she sought treatment in her early 20s. “And then when I went to treatment, the story came out,” she said. “Someone basically sold the story that I had been in treatment.”

Then Sweetin had to face the choice of talking about her addiction or hiding from the press. “I chose to just face it because it’s not going to go anywhere,” she said. “And the more you try to not talk about something, the more people want to talk about it.”

On the podcast, Sweetin told Lowry it had been 16 years since she drank alcohol and 13 years since she had a medication relapse.

And getting back into acting was challenging for Sweetin because “the only thing that people wanted to talk about” was her addiction. “So there were times I was like, oh, why didn’t I just keep my mouth shut? Why didn’t I just say, I don’t want to talk about it?”

But Sweetin “got to come back” to Hollywood for Fuller House, Netflix’s Full House reboot, and her acting career continued with Dateless to Dangerous: My Son’s Secret Life, a TV movie that premiered on Lifetime last month.

“You know, I just never gave up knowing that I had more to offer than just being some salacious story,” Sweetin said.