Amber Portwood is opening up about the progress she’s made in her mental health journey, telling fans this week that she’s “doing a million times better.” 

As you know, the former ‘Teen Mom’ star returned to social media last week by announcing her newly launched YouTube channel, where she plans to drop a new video every week. The first video featured a life update from the mom of two, who was coming off a months-long social media hiatus.

This week, Amber opened up about her ongoing mental health journey, which she claims has greatly improved over the years.  

At the beginning of her video, Amber admitted to fans that it was difficult for her to accept the fact that she had any mental illnesses– so much, in fact, that she initially “didn’t take the medication” prescribed to her and turned to self-medicating instead. Although her decision to self-medicate eventually caused her to get “into trouble,” Amber said it wasn’t until she saw some of her behavior on TV that she realized how much she needed to follow her doctor’s orders. 

“ … I started watching myself on TV around this time and, you know, even though I wouldn’t take anything back, I look at it and I’m like, oh my God,” she said. “Like, that’s not me … I started taking my medication afterwards, just simply because I was watching myself and I wanted to help myself and there was a lot of people around me at the time that wanted to help me.” 

(As fans of ‘Teen Mom’ know, Amber has been diagnosed with multiple mental illnesses, including Borderline Personality Disorder and Bipolar 2 Disorder. While she doesn’t specify the timeline of some of the events discussed in her latest video, the first comments are seemingly referring to the early years of ‘Teen Mom’– before she went to jail in 2012.) 

While Amber admitted that her medication “was working for a little bit,” she stopped taking it at some point, calling the move, “one of the worst decisions” she’s ever made.  

“I had this insane crash of emotions and ups and downs and impulsiveness and just crazy things that I was doing,” she recalled. “I mean, I can’t tell you guys all the stories. It was really crazy. It took the hard lesson of going, probably to prison, to understand there was something wrong [and] that I needed to keep on watching this the best that I could because this was actually not something small … .” 

As the video continued, Amber revealed that she was prescribed a dozen different medications at one point, though she’s currently prescribed just two. 

“I found the right medications and I’m doing a million times better,” she said. “I’m still me, but I’m not as impulsive, I’m not as angry, I’m not as ridiculous as I used to be in my behaviors. I just know that today, I feel comfortable with everything that I’m doing … .” 

Amber credits her current mental health state to being both properly medicated and properly treated by a psychiatrist.  

“Do [doctors] want you on 12 different medications? Yeah, they do,” she said. “But find a doctor who says, ‘You know what? We’re on this many [medications] right now, but maybe we want to get down to this many … .’ That’s what I found. That’s why I’ve been with my doctor now for 7 years. 

“He said, ‘All right, you’re on 12 different medications, but we’re going to have you down to two eventually,’” Amber continued. “And damn sure, we are down to two after all these years, just by speaking to each other and actually being honest.”   

As she mentioned in her first YouTube video, Amber reiterated this week that mental health treatment is not a “one-size fits all” thing, though she also insisted that self-care is something that everyone needs to prioritize. 

“Life is going to be hard everybody, sincerely,” Amber said. “Everybody right now is going through something … but everybody [has to] take care of themselves in different ways.” 

Despite being estranged from her teenage daughter Leah, Amber also doled out some parenting tips in her video. 

After telling parents to “be proactive” if they believe their child is exhibiting symptoms of a mood disorder, Amber encouraged parents to openly communicate with their kids about “how they’re feeling and thinking.” 

“ … in my beginning stages of all of this, I had no clue why I was so different and weird and so angry … ,” Amber recalled of her own adolescence. “You know, if my mom would have known better and my father and everybody would have known better, I believe that they would have been proactive in making sure that something could happen. But we were also poor. 

“I bet you right now there are so many parents out there that want to do something and want to help their kids, but they just can’t because they don’t have f**king insurance and they cannot afford it,” she continued.    

Amber concluded this week’s video by acknowledging how difficult it may be for parents to learn that their child has a mental health disorder, as some may blame themselves.

“ … they’ve got these studies out [there] connecting [mental health disorders] to the genes and this and that … who cares?” Amber said. “Okay, don’t think about that. What does that have to do with helping your child out? Nothing.”  

You can watch Amber’s latest YouTube video below. 

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(Photos: YouTube; MTV)