Lena Dunham: 'Rehab pals showed me I was worth saving'

Lena Dunham has given a special thanks to the people she met during her time at rehab for helping her on her "life-changing" journey to sobriety.

The Girls creator, 33, checked into the Friendly House treatment centre in Los Angeles in early 2018, after admitting to misusing anti-anxiety medication Klonopin. She is now 18 months sober.

Speaking while she was presented with the Women Of The Year award at the organisation's 30th Awards Luncheon at The Beverly Hilton hotel on Saturday, the star opened up about the pivotal role the people she met in the facility played in her recovery.

Recalling the moment her parents dropped her at the centre "like it was camp", she shared: "I took off my boots. There was a no shoes rule, and walked into a room of people whose pain radiated off of them, like some terrible superpower."

"I was such an open nerve that on my first day of group therapy when I was asked to share a little bit about why I was there, I told my seemingly endless tale of, whoa, you know, the one that justified and necessitated being numbed by medication," the star confessed, adding, "The patients and the therapist simply looked at me and said, 'S**t'."

She went on to explain how she and the other residents "connected through the miracle of recovery", and she began to heal "because I allowed myself to be loved by a group of people in recovery who showed me that I was worth saving and worth loving no matter what metaphorical and, like, sometimes literal alleys I had wandered down."