Nearly eighteen months after entering treatment for suicidal thoughts, ‘Teen Mom OG’ star Catelynn Lowell has opened up about her mental health struggles and the ‘trauma’ of giving her first child up for adoption.
“It was after we struggled with a miscarriage, and I kept waking up with panic attacks, and they were not going away — it was for, like, two weeks,” Catelynn Lowell, 27, said during the June 14 episode of the Reality Life With Kate Casey podcast. During the conversation, the Teen Mom OG star opened up the decision to seek treatment in 2017 after experiencing suicidal thoughts. “And I think when you keep waking up with panic attacks over and over, it leads me into a depression. I just remember thinking like, ‘I don’t wanna wake up like this anymore.
“I was just thinking random things like, ‘I’m gonna drive off the road and hit that pole,’ or thinking of all these different ways that I could commit suicide,” said Catelynn [around 9:00 in the episode]. “And, I think that’s really – I was in the house, [Novalee Baltierra] was in school. Tyler [Baltierra, 27] was with our producers and they were like doing yoga or something. I was at the house by myself. and I remember [Tyler] had a belt hanging up on one of the hooks in our bedroom, and I remember thinking to myself, ‘I could totally use that belt and wrap it around my neck and just be done with it.’ “
When Tyler and the producer came back, Catelynn said she “was just honest with them. I’m really thinking all these crazy things. I think I need to get help before I do something bad, something I’ll regret. I need to do something.” Catelynn said that she sought help the next day. “The place I went to was extremely helpful and helped me get on the right medication.” The Teen Mom OG star said she went through genetic testing to find out that her body “was not even metabolizing” the medication she had been taking for five years. “I was taking 200mg of that medication and my body was only getting 60mg. …it wasn’t doing anything beneficial.”
After she got on the right medication and underwent some therapy, Catelynn was able to make some headway with her mental health. She worked with a trauma therapist to work on a huge part of her past: giving her first daughter, now 10-year-old daughter, Carly, up for adoption. “I think any woman who places a child up for adoption, it’s a traumatic experience for them,” she said. “My counselor there taught me that it’s okay to be sad about it sometimes, and it’s okay to be like, ‘wow, it sucks sometimes,’ and also feel the good too. But you have to feel the [sadness] of it too. You can’t just brush it off. In order to get better, you have to feel whatever you’re feeling, whether it’s sad, angry, happy.”
Since taking these steps to take care of herself, Catelynn has found happiness with Tyler. The two welcomed their third child, daughter Vaeda, in February. She and Tyler have even found a living arrangement that works, as she said that taking a break from living under the same roof has actually strengthened their relationship.
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