Amber Portwood, as we all know so very, very well by now, has a whole lot of issues.
Mental health issues, relationship issues, issues with the law …
The list really goes on and on.
Amber is troubled on so many levels that she rarely has anything else to talk about during her segments on Teen Mom OG, and we saw plenty of proof of that during the current season.
So much of her screentime was dedicated to her difficulty connecting to her daughter, Leah, after years of skipping visitation time and generally not making her a priority in her life.
Leah lives with her father and Amber’s ex, Gary Shirley, and Gary’s wife, Kristina, does most of the mothering for Leah, which is something that Leah herself has acknowledged.
Amber has really seemed to have a difficult time in accepting that, and so instead of accepting it she’s chosen to just offer up a bunch of excuses and hope that at least a few of them stick.
This week, MTV aired the Teen Mom OG season finale, and it was more of the same for this girl, except with a little change of venue …
… Because this time Amber took Gary along for an appointment with her psychiatrist!
She said in a voiceover that she wanted to bring him to the appointment because “I want my relationship to be better with Leah, so I need Gary to understand my mental illnesses.”
In the actual session, she told her doctor that she wanted him to be there because “he’s always been a little skeptic of some of my mental illnesses, so I just kind of thought that the best thing I could do is to inform him with you.”
Gary said that his primary goal was to get better at coparenting with Amber, but that he did want to try to be more understanding as well.
Her doctor explained that Amber’s primary diagnoses were borderline personality disorder in which “the major issue is a fear of abandonment,” and bipolar disorder, which he said is “confusing” for the other people because they never know what to expect from her.
He asked Gary if he’d seen any changes in Amber recently, and Gary said that she hadn’t been getting as angry lately, but he brought up his issues of her Instagram Lives, which seems to be where she gets out much of that anger when it does pop up.
“Her Instagram posts, videos, whether directed toward her fans or if it’s directed toward us, Leah sees that and she doesn’t, like, want that,” he said. “‘Cause what happens is some of her friends see it too, and when they see it, it’s embarrassing for Leah.”
Just in case we forgot about those posts, MTV edited in some footage from them, including one in which Amber claimed that Kristina doesn’t do anything for Leah, which was honestly ridiculous and also probably a good example of why Leah doesn’t like those kinds of posts.
Amber jumped in to say “I was having a really horrible manic episode, and you go through mania for a couple weeks and you talk a lot of sh-t, and you just feel horrible afterwards.”
“When you get down you’re like, ‘Oh man, how do I fix this? Can I fix this?’ How do you explain that to a 12-year-old?”
She said that she’d given control of her Instagram to her manager, but we’re not so sure about that, because she definitely still makes her own social media posts — she’s done at least a few Lives this month, including one where she cried about unfairly she’s been portrayed.
At another point in the session, Amber said “A lot of us people like me, it’s like burning bridges left and right and that’s not something I want to do with Leah. I think she feels really abandoned even though I never meant to do that.”
“I also don’t think she understands a lot of what I did was for her.”
When asked what she meant, she said that she stayed away from Leah so much to protect her, and that if she had been around more, Leah “would be a different child.”
She continued with “There was times Gary believes I just didn’t want to pick her up because of a man and really I would be getting a nice bruise on my face that I was trying to put makeup over and couldn’t cover it.”
“I would have to call and make up some really dumb f-cking excuse that Gary would be like, ‘OK.’ I thought I was protecting her, but at the same time, people say you could have left certain people. It was really hard.”
She didn’t offer any more details on that specifically, but we do know that she claimed to have been abused during her breakup with Matt Baier, and the co-author of her new book has said that we don’t know the truth about the night she was arrested for assaulting Andrew Glennon.
We also know that she dated some pretty sketchy guys besides those two, so it’s hard to say exactly who she’s trying to accuse here.
In the end, Amber’s psychiatrist told Gary that Leah getting therapy on her own would be a good thing, and that maybe after a bit of that they could work toward family therapy.
Gary said he was “open” to the idea of Leah getting therapy, and he told Amber that “As far as you being diagnosed, I can now know at least what two of your disorders are and I understand a little more about it.”
He also told her that he’d thought before that she used her mental illness “as an excuse,” but that it was helpful for him to hear a doctor discuss it all.
That’s an awful lot to unpack, huh?
We know that Amber has had some terrible boyfriends, and we know that she was terrible to them — it wouldn’t be a huge surprise if any of them were abusive towards her, and there’s no excuse for that, or for her being abusive towards them.
But we’ve also seen plenty of footage of Amber without a bruise on her face making excuses for why she didn’t want to see her children, and in court documents we learned that she once skipped a visit with her son because it was raining, and that was when she was single.
Everyone knows that she suffers from severe mental illness, but there are thousands of people who suffer in the same way who don’t treat people like Amber does.
Do you think she’ll ever own up to what she’s done?
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