"Teen Mom 2" star Leah Messer felt "suffocated" by the pressure of life so she attempted to commit suicide by driving her car off a cliff in a drug haze.
The 27-year-old opened up about her harrowing experience in her upcoming memoir, "Hope, Grace & Faith," which was obtained by The Sun.
The 27-year-old reality star said she was battling to cope with ongoing issues when she climbed into her car that night. She was feeling deep-seated guilt after learning that her daughter Ali suffered from muscular dystrophy, she was battling an addiction to pills, and was coming to terms with the breakdown of her second marriage.
At the time she was living with her father, who also struggled with addiction. He offered her a strong painkiller, Lortab, to "just take the edge off." Then things grew hazy. Leah wrote of how she found herself in the car, with tears streaming down her face as she sped down Mink Shoals Hill in West Virginia, her foot "pressed down on the gas."
She recalled barely being able to "see the road through the tears" as the needle of the speedometer climbed from "80...to 90...to 110 mph." All she could think about was ending her suffering.
"There's a steep cliff off the side of the road just up ahead. It would be so easy to drive my car over the edge," she wrote. "Then it would all be over. No more worries. No more failure. No more pain."
She thought "everyone would be better off" if she ended her life, but then her mind began to drift to her children, twins Ali and Aleeah, and 7-year-old Addie. She slowed the car and pulled over to the side of the road.
"A lifetime of tears comes pouring out of the deepest part of my soul. I cry so hard I wonder if I'll ever be able to stop. Then a thought cuts through the deafening static in my brain: My daughters need me," she wrote.
That night, Leah received a message from her executive producer Larry Musnik, who was concerned after seeing footage of the ordeal filmed by an MTV camera crew. He had been trying to convince Leah to seek treatment and that night she relented.
"I kept saying no because I thought I could handle things on my own, but now I wasn't so sure" she said. "I had to do something because I had gone from anxious and depressed to suicidal."
Zoe Papadakis ✉
Zoe Papadakis is a Newsmax writer based in South Africa with two decades of experience specializing in media and entertainment. She has been in the news industry as a reporter, writer and editor for newspapers, magazine and websites.
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