Poppin' Pills, Suicide Attempts & Sex Addiction: Amber Portwood Reveals Her Darkest Secrets In New Tell-All
Sept. 2 2014, Published 8:10 a.m. ET
Former Teen Mom star Amber Portwood opens up in her explosive new tell-all book, revealing a life riddled with drug addiction, suicide attempts and even a sex addiction, RadarOnline.com is exclusively reporting.
Since being released from prison in November the reality TV star has focused on staying sober, but documents in Never Too Late just exactly what led her to this point in her life.
"I couldn't change what was going on around me, and I couldn't control that sadness inside of me, either. It was really bad. It was so bad, honestly, that when I was eleven I made the first of many extreme attempts to fix it. I tried to kill myself," Portwood reveals of her childhood — including an alcoholic father.
"No one was home when I did it. I just took a cord into the bathroom and hung it on the fan in the ceiling, and I looped it around my neck."
Portwood says she remembers waking up on the floor.
"I don't know how long I was out," she wrote.
"But the fan had only been held up in the ceiling with one screw in the middle, and the weight pulled the fan so it stripped the screw and fell to the floor. I didn't try again — I just kind of chalked it up to a failure."
Portwood, now 24-years-old, would go on attempt suicide several other times, including a 2011 incident in which she would again tie a rope around her neck.
"Adderall was the first pill I ever took," she explained in the book of her pill popping, noting it would definitely not be the last.
Eventually Portwood got hooked on opiates like Hydros, Oxy and Klonopin.
"Adderall wouldn't be the last pill I'd swallow. Not by a long shot. What I didn't realize yet was that there were a lot of different kinds of drugs out there to take, and it would only take me a couple more tries to find something I actually did like," she wrote.
The moment Portwood found out she was pregnant with her daughter she says she stopped abusing prescription pills — but about six months after Leah's birth it started back up again.
"It started out slow, but we would end up losing ourselves in the money and that weird kind of fame we had landed in," Portwood said of her and baby daddy Gary Shirley.
"I hadn't messed with pills since I found out I was pregnant with Leah. And for six months after she was born, I stayed sober. But I was already reaching the limit with my unhappiness and stress, and I was almost begging for something to come along and offer me a way to escape.
"A Klonopin prescription was the obvious step for somebody suffering that much anxiety. But almost right away, I started eating them all up, and that was the beginning of me becoming an addict."
Along with a pill addiction and the craziness associated with being a reality TV star, Portwood's relationship with Shirley crumbled and she found herself single and living an unhealthy lifestyle that included a sex addiction.
"It was a bad time," Portwood recalled of hitting rock bottom and having lost custody of her daughter.
"I was doing whatever I wanted, and I didn't do anything in moderation. It was always extreme when it came to partying and sex. When it really got down to it, my life at that time was nothing but pills and men… Looking back I think it's obvious I had a bad sex addiction along with the pill addiction."
Although Portwood admittedly struggles with her sobriety on a daily basis, she has a dream of helping other young people in similar situations as her own.
"I want to open the kind of facility I started to visualize when I was in prison, a place where people can get the kind of intense blend of education, discipline, and community support that will help them find the strength they have inside," Portwood writes at the end of the book.
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"Just a couple short years ago, I thought there was no hope for me. I was wrong. There's never a good reason to give up. There's always a way to turn things around. You just have to look at someone like me as proof that it's never too late."
