Tana Mongeau Reveals Her Addiction to Xanax and Says She “Didn’t Care” About Living

Tana Mongeau may have her own reality TV show, but she’s revealing that what you see isn’t all that real.

The 21-year-old is opening up about this and more in her latest YouTube video, which she titles “Letting you in on the truth about MTV, depression + a life update.” The hour-long video is a lengthy discussion about her mental health and how she’s really doing behind closed doors.

To start, the reality TV star shares that filming this confessional of sorts is really “nerve-wracking” because, “after this, a lot of people will look at me differently.” 

“A lot of the things I’m about to say hold a lot of weight,” she admits. “2019 might’ve been one of the most successful textbook years of my life, but when it comes to my mental state, it was absolutely, hands-down in my 21-years of life the worst year of that.” Her breakup from boyfriend Jake Paul and ongoing issues with her allegedly “abusive” parents only served to harm her mental health further.

Tana then confesses to being addicted to Xanax, something that she’s never fully admitted to before. 

The 21-year-old says, “I was definitely taking enough to where I wasn’t trying to kill myself but I definitely didn’t care if I died.”

Tana states that people around her knew she took the medication, but with filming for her reality show approaching, the star was forced to confess to her manager Jordan Worona how bad things had gotten. She recalls, “The night before we started filming the season I told Jordan how much I was taking when all that s–t happened with my mom. He was kind of like, ‘So you tried to kill yourself?’ And I was like, ‘No, I just took this amount of pills,’ and he was like, ‘If you’re taking that much and you know it can kill you, you’re okay with that?'”

At this point, Tana says her health was “failing” and she didn’t “care to be alive at all.” In addition to popping pills, the vlogger shares she was constantly smoking weed, she had a cough that was “getting worse and worse” and the filming schedule for her MTV reality show “exhausted” her. 

While she was aware of the impact filming had on her physically and mentally, the star says she continued with the show, because she thought, “if I’m going to show this amount of pain to the world, please make it something that people can learn from or watch and get something out of it.”

However, the star believes the team at MTV took advantage of her mental state in order to create an entertaining reality TV show. “I think MTV, they like drama, they know how to give us call-times that make us really tired and give us phone calls and meetings that make us really stressed and have the producers whisper little things to us that make us bicker. We fought a lot on the show, but a lot of the things that are now edited to make it look like this major serious fight were sarcastic things we were saying to each other,” she alleges. 

Tana adds she understands “that’s what a reality show is going to do,” but she hates to think that her fans would believe she “hate[s] him” or takes him for granted. She insists, “I love Jordan more than anything in the world and I’m not going to say I wasn’t a d–k to him but I promise you off camera I was apologizing, we were working through it.”

Moreover, Mongeau tells her viewers that while MTV’s footage made it look like she was mean to doctors or staff, that’s far from the truth. In reality, she and the crew were “shooting this on day six, hour 100 of shooting the show” and she was “bickering” with Jordan, but they took those conversations completely “out of context.” In the final cut of the show, she claims they made it look like she was arguing with the doctor. 

“I blame myself for even being in such a mindset to just film like that and not even think of what MTV would do with it,” she reflects.

Tana acknowledges that some people are going to say she’s lying but she knows who she is. “I always have gone out of my way to be known as he person who is always so nice to their fans and treats everyone like equal.”

She continues, “I hate who I was at that time. I wish that footage wasn’t out there. I wish I never gave the opportunity for someone to edit me like that. I will never ever ever go back to a place that was that dark.”

Tana says she knows she can’t go back and change what happened, but she regrets that her friends had to see the “worst” version of herself. In addition, she says, “It breaks my heart that I brought my friends onto this show,” which ended up painting them in a bad light. 

She further explains that as she was seeking answers for her terrible cough, producers wanted to include her friends’ reaction to it all. So, when Tana saw a “specialist” and his diagnosis came back, they wanted to shoot her telling her friends. “MTV [was] building them up all day telling them, ‘What if Tana has lung cancer, what are you going to do?'”

But she claims the crew already knew she just had asthma, which later ended up being a false diagnosis. 

E! News has reached out to MTV for comment. 

Eventually, the star says she realized three to four weeks into filming that only she could help herself. Tana remembers, “I knew that if I didn’t change something I was going to die, whether it was from a drug overdose, complete exhaustion or letting my suicidal thoughts get the best of me. Or, if I didn’t take care of my health to the point of no return.”

After coming to this realization, she says she moved out of her home, “because every day there were like forty people from MTV at my house and I felt like I couldn’t even live in my house.” She adds that she felt like a “zoo animal on display” with all those people around. 

Upon moving into an apartment away from the crew, she focused on her desire to “change my life” by improving her physical and mental health in every possible way. By that point, her nose was “bleeding every day” and she was “exhausted.”

Months have passed and the star isn’t perfect, but she says she’s “finally in a place to be a role model.” This is part of the reason why she’s going to open up more about her depression and health, because she hopes to “encourage” others to get the help they need.

She tells the camera, “I have this platform with millions of people listening to the things I say and I can do more to be a better person and make the world a better person. I needed to be the almost exact opposite of that and hit that darkest, lowest point to understand how important life is and what I have is.”