Mayhem: A Mental Health Memoir

By Moniece Slaughter

Get ready for the must-have journey of self-discovery and personal growth that everyone is talking about! Mayhem is Moniece Slaughter's thoughtful and healing new book focused on staying true to her personal journey to genuine happiness, wholeness, inner peace, and fulfillment of purpose. After fans have asked her to write a book for years, she has done so while attempting to abandon fear and failure.

If you're looking for an access point into Moniece's real story behind the television scandals - without judgement - then this book is it! Werewolf through her candid testimonies on abandonment issues, loyalty, self-love, centering yourself within chaos; adulting in the face of adversity; taking responsibility for your past but not letting it define you. Learn more about how this brave author overcame dark moments with humor and sharp observations in full detail. Discover groundbreaking tools used to stay aligned with hopes and dreams that will empower anyone from any walk of life.

Order Mayhem today and treat yourself to a meaningful journey of self-discovery unlike any other. Be prepared to increase your understanding of life by diving deep into Moniece's rich experiences – may they teach us all something new!

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Feb 22, 2023
• ISBN: 9781667891224

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Mental Health and Black People

I don’t refer to myself as a mental health advocate because I can’t advocate for other people. I don’t believe in giving people advice, because that’s what therapy is for, and I think that’s something, societally and especially culturally, that we forget.

As Black people, we often grow up in environments where our families are:

1) Diagnosing us with things (incorrectly, I might add), or disregarding our diagnoses

2) Claiming it can be fixed with a holistic diet, getting more sleep, going to church, or simply by prayer, or by drinking more water, breaking the chains the devil has on you, not listening to secular music or watching secular television, honoring the Sabbath, and so on.

There’s always an answer—whether that’s honoring your mother and father, respecting your elders, watching the people we surround ourselves with (avoiding the wrong crowd), the job we work, or cutting out your friends. If you can sit in the house and not associate with people who weren’t raised in the same religion as you, who don’t know God the way your praying parents and grandparents do, if you would pray more, if you would go back to church and pay your tithe, if you would simply live by the rules of the written word, and obey the Ten Commandments, then things would get better. Whatever demons and dark spirits and shackles the devil has put on you can all be removed from your life if you simply do these things. These are some of the solutions we are given.

Then there is the other side of the family that is always quick to provide an unfounded diagnosis. You’re deemed mentally ill and that’s that. You can’t have an emotional disorder. You can’t possibly be experiencing a temporary depressive state brought on by extenuating life circumstances or everyday life stressors that have been mounting over time. You can’t just have a naturally anxious personality type, thus be diagnosed with anxiety. In Black families and communities, things like depression, anxiety, social anxiety, ADD, or ADHD, are either ignored or they’re treated the same as debilitating mental illnesses. There is no middle ground. There is no education or understanding. That means there’s no empathy or compassion for those of us who are afflicted, let alone those of us who are candid with or about our struggles.

That’s why I don’t like to call myself a mental health advocate or expert. I advocate for myself in my family, my workspace, my friend group, and my romantic relationships, but I can’t advocate for people outside of my circles. I can, in certain situations, use my platform and voice to bring awareness and advocate for change. I do those things as much as I can. However, when talking directly with someone, I don’t tell them what they need to do. I don’t tell someone what they are or aren’t, what I think they have or what I think they don’t have. I share only what I discovered about myself and what has worked and hasn’t worked for me, personally.

Anxiety, Depression, and the Single Mom

I’m a single mom. A lot of people don’t like to acknowledge that because my son’s father is in the picture, and we do share custody and work well together now that I have left Love & Hip Hop. When my son is with me, it’s just us. There is no staff, no live-in nanny, no assistant to run my errands or manage my schedule, there’s no team.

That means he’s had the front-row seat to what anxiety and depression really look like. There are days when I haven’t been able to eat or sleep and I end up short-tempered, exhausted, and unable to get up in the morning, resulting in eighteen tardies for my son in one school semester. He’s had to live in clutter and chaos and has been afraid to approach me to cook or clean up behind him. He’s hesitant to ask me to play with him, or simply relax and watch movies with him.

Even after having no other choice but talk to him about it, I still couldn’t help but feel like the shittiest, most incapable, unde-serving mother on the planet. The public scrutiny and the private criticism from my parents only compound my hopelessness and feelings of self-doubt and maternal inadequacies.

I hope that my decision to write this book and being candid about the never-ending cycle of falling and picking myself up in my efforts to get a grip on my mental wellness will encourage someone, somewhere, to stop letting the fear of being shunned because of other people’s ignorance keep them from getting the help they need and deserve. I hope I provoke thought and evoke true change, and most of all, I hope to spread love and offer understanding while oversharing.

Maybe my decision to write this book will provide someone with a new perspective that will ultimately result in the ability to show the people in their life who might be suffering or struggling from emotional disorders or mental illnesses a way through. Maybe my decision to write this book will allow the individual who didn’t have the insight before to give grace and show mercy upon those who are afflicted now.

Maybe they don’t fully understand it. Maybe they’re a fan of mine and my story helps them to go on or understand those around them better. Maybe they’ll think, Maybe I might want to be more patient with this person, or approach this person a different way, or maybe I will suggest this for that person. Whatever it is, I hope my experience can help someone in some way.

I’m the first African American woman on reality television to openly talk about mental health and as a result, I have now, single-handedly, shifted the rules within the reality TV, the radio, and the podcast spaces. People can no longer, within those spaces, just label people mentally ill, assign them a diagnosis, or call them crazy or insane.

CHAPTER 2

Discussing Mental Illness

When it comes to mental health, it feels like White people can talk about it more openly than Black people. There is already a worldwide stigma surrounding the term mental illness, as well as related therapy and medication—all things related to mental health, really. It’s almost as if it means there is something wrong with you that can never be managed or cured or dealt with in any meaningful way. The best thing that my therapist could have ever helped me to understand is that a diagnosis does not define me.

It’s like when you have a cold. You don’t say, I am a cold. Or like with COVID, you don’t say, I am COVID. You would say, "I have a cold, or I had the flu, or I’m sick with COVID." What do you do when you are afflicted with something? You get treated. I went to the hospital for COVID. They treated me for COVID. I have been treated for COVID. I have recovered from COVID.

It’s the same with mental illness. People go around saying, I am mentally ill, but that implies there is something utterly, gravely, and permanently wrong with them, and much of the stigma originates from the declaration or self-proclamation from the patient themselves. It almost always opens the floodgates of disparaging and demeaning comments from those who aren’t suffering, or from those who simply don’t understand mental illness and all its forms. Hearing the words mentally ill, mental illness, psychiatric care, antidepressants, and so on, because of the stigma, many people automatically think homeless, violent, unkempt, an inability to have or raise children, talking to themselves, and so on. That is certainly not the case for all of us.

Then there are the more extreme cases, like my brother, who has schizoaffective disorder and bipolar mania, and it is crippling for him. My brother will never be able to live on his own, and he’ll probably never be able to experience a loving relationship with someone, he might not ever be able to work a job or make friends. That’s also where the stigma truly and negatively impacts people, because for those of us who don’t suffer from a more severe diagnosis, or don’t have immediate family members who are suffering with a more serious mental illness, it’s hard to relate to and understand those who do. They don’t live in the same reality. They don’t process the way a normal person is told they should interact, react, and respond to the world around them, and being a Black or Brown man or woman will almost always lead to being automatically disregarded.

Black, White, and Celebrity Mental Illness and Public Perception

It’s a common trend that White people generally don’t shame other White people for openly talking about their mental health status or diagnoses. There seems to be more empathy, they seem to be given more grace. There seems to be an automatic attempt to understand the why and less of a social urge to diagnose or label them right away.

When the media publishes images or videos of a White person, public figure or not, the spectators don’t usually respond with, They’re crazy, or Looks like they are off their meds. There’s more encouragement urging them to get the help they need without assigning or asserting what that help is or should be. There’s online banter about how sad it is and wondering what could have gone wrong, expressions of sorrow, right down to feeling bad for or hoping their damn pets are OK. Especially now, as we live in the digital era, White people generally are open and supportive of those who come out with their own mental health experiences.

Take for instance, Amanda Bynes or Britney Spears. We have seen them come out publicly and talk about their experiences. In the beginning, when Britney Spears hit, we didn’t hear her say anything about her mental health. Then we saw her break and watched her shave her head and attack a paparazzo’s car with an umbrella. Back then, in 2007, no one was talking about how this girl was under an immense amount of pressure. We didn’t have as much access to social media. We had outlets such as E! News and TMZ, and mainstream news. Yet I didn’t see White people openly attacking her. I saw Black people making fun and laughing at her on the Internet.

Now, all these years later, with everyone afforded a front-row seat to the real lives of all these celebrities thanks to social media, we hear about her conservatorship and all the things Britney’s family was doing to her.

Suddenly, when everyone knows what’s going on behind closed doors, they all have empathy. Now it’s, Oh I can see why she broke down in the first place. If I was under those conditions, I would have done so too. I would have done this or that, and so on.

They used her. They were abusing her, and then you add the pressure from her ex-husband and being a mother to her kids. Today, celebrities are afforded more grace than just a few short years ago. Now everybody goes back to that paparazzi moment with Britney attacking the car with the umbrella and everybody says, Dang, we had no idea. But even then, it wasn’t White people who were openly criticizing her.

Take Donald J. Trump, for example. Chelsea Handler spoke out. Jimmy Fallon spoke out. Many prevalent and prominent Caucasian figures spoke out to express their disdain for Trump. But they never attacked him as a man or as a husband.

Yes, there were jokes going around from people of all colors and tax brackets about Melania never wanting to hold his hand, but no one attacked him as a father unless Donald Trump, Jr. or Eric Trump was speaking out. Then came the Like father like son … the apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree jokes. When I saw