In an emotionally charged Twitch stream last night, popular streamer Jayson "MANvsGAME" Love told his audience of thousands that he has struggled with drug addiction over the last year.
"This right now is the first time you've probably seen me in over the last year where I'm not on drugs," Love said. "Every single time you've seen me, I've been pretty much saturated with speed. With amphetamines, like Adderall."
Love spent the next hour of the cast going into detail on how he's been struggling with depression and using both drugs and streaming as an escape.
"I really stopped caring this last year about a lot of things," said Love. "But my well-being was certainly one of them."
Love's drug habits were initially revealed to some of his fans on Twitter via a friend concerned for his health. Love also addressed this on the stream, calling the action "not helpful."
"Human beings don't just cast for 50 hours"
"This is extremely difficult for me, and like I said, I'm a very private person," he said. "I feel like I've definitely been made to sort of just do this. I have to comment on it now. I still don't feel like this is what needed to be done, or what ultimately is helpful."
Love also spoke to the strangeness of Twitch as a platform where personalities are often considered like close friends by the audience.
"A lot of people out there, you think you know me," Love said. "You'll never know me. I know what's so great about the platform, with the interaction and all of that, it feels like we're very close sometimes. There's this whole side of my life — the majority of my life, the majority of me as a person — that you have no idea what's going on. Seeing people casually weigh in about very personal, private subjects to me.... It's just been difficult to read on social media without wanting to just lash out."
Love admitted that he didn't think his drug use was actually a huge secret. He pointed to his frequent marathon casts, often lasting well past 24 full hours.
"It's obvious," he said. "Or at least I used to think that. Human beings don't just cast for 50 hours. The human body just doesn't do it. If you try to stay awake for 24 hours, that right there is a monumental task to your average human being."
Throughout the cast, Love describes how he went from taking one pill to help him last eight hours on a cast to taking many pills throughout and extending casts far too long. He says the bottom may have been an 82-hour stream he did the week that Batman: Arkham Knight released. During another cast, he pushed himself too far and actually fell asleep on-air.
Speaking again to how important his privacy is, Love said that he will "not field questions about it freely." You can watch the stream for yourself above, which begins at around the 14-minute mark.
Love has spoken to Polygon previously about Twitch's audio copyright changes in 2014, and about TwitchCon and the life of a streamer earlier this year. He declined to comment further to Polygon about last night's stream. Twitch didn't respond to a request for comment as of the time of publication of this article.
