Tamar Braxton: Life After Suicide Attempt, Health Scares, & More

Courtesy of Blackdoctor/Instagram

Award-winning singer and famous family member Tamar Braxton has spoken openly about her struggles with mental health, including severe depression and anxiety, and has also faced physical health challenges like pulmonary emboli and thoracic outlet syndrome, requiring surgery.

Now that she just turned 48, Braxton is reflecting on her past. Not only on how she’s overcome, but staying the course to be better for herself and family.

What Happened During Her Suicide Attempt

At the time, Braxton was home with her son Logan (then 7, whom she shares with her ex-husband, music executive Vincent Herbert) and her then-boyfriend, financial consultant David Adefeso, who found her unresponsive, and she was rushed to the hospital.

“That time of my life was so dark and so heavy,” she tells PEOPLE in one of this week’s cover stories. “I didn’t see how I was going to come out on the other side. I didn’t even know that there was another side. But I chose to change my life.”

“Most people think, ‘Oh, she went to a hotel, probably took a bunch of drugs, was on a binge.’ It didn’t happen like that. It was just everyday life, trying to figure out how to get through the day and then …” Braxton continues, stopping short of reliving exactly what happened.

Since then, become a fierce mental health advocate, noted that starring in The Surreal Life was different from her time on Braxton Family Values, which she has previously admitted took a toll on her mental health.

“I’m a prime example of you don’t have to stay where you are, you can put in a lot of hard work and challenge yourself and really make the decision to wanna be better and do better and I did that,” she said. “So, I’m here from where I was from a year and a half, two years ago, just for the next person who feels like there isn’t a light at the end of the tunnel, here I am. There definitely is.”

Despite the confidence she exuded onscreen, she says she now realizes she’d never fully dealt with having been repeatedly molested as a child, an experience she says was brought up in a 2018 taping without her consent.

“How it came out was very traumatic for me,” she says. (A WE tv spokesperson declined to comment on Braxton’s most recent statements but noted that her past revelations about childhood sexual abuse never aired and were not discussed on Braxton Family Values.)

“I thought I had successfully buried that part of me, but it was manifesting in different ways,” continues Braxton, who was often shown to be on edge and irritable on her shows. “It was coming out in how I dealt with things emotionally, how I looked at situations, how I conducted myself.”

According to the largest research study on children who have been molested, children who experience physical, sexual, and emotional abuse or neglect are at least two to three times more likely to attempt suicide in later life.

The analysis of 68 studies by psychologists at the University of Manchester and University of South Wales revealed that suicide attempts were:

• Three times more likely for people who experienced sexual abuse as a child
• Two and a half times more likely for people who experienced physical abuse as a child
• Two and a half times more likely for people who experienced emotional abuse or neglect as a child
• Also from the research published in Psychological Medicine today, children who experienced multiple abuse are as much as five times higher to attempt suicide.

And as those people who experienced abuse as children get older, the risk of suicide attempts increases.

People not in contact with mental health clinicians were found to be at the highest level of risk.

Braxton shares that she started to feel boxed into an increasingly negative onscreen persona. Things came to a head during the filming of Get Ya Life!, which she says sensationalized her life as a single mom and her admittedly rocky relationship with Adefeso.

“After a scene, I’d watch it back, and it would be nothing like how it went down,” she says. “They started piecing words together and sentences. I just thought that wasn’t necessary.”

“It was my spirit, and my soul that was tainted the most. There are a few things I count on most to be, a good mother, a good daughter, a good partner, a good sister, and a good person,” she wrote. “Who I was, begun to mean little to nothing, because it would only be how I was portrayed on television that would matter.”

Tamar Suffered from Other Serious Health Conditions

Just two years ago, the singer and TV personality shared a post with her followers on Instagram, revealing that she had been shopping and spending time with friends when she suddenly found herself struggling to breathe.

“This isn’t an attention post… this is an ATTENTION post,” she wrote in the caption. “Literally I was with my best firends… shopping and doing Christmas fun s*** and the VERY NEXT DAY I had to be taken to the hospital by AMBULANCE, needed oxygen cause I thought God was taking me home cause I could not breathe and my chest was on FIRE!!”

Braxton since said she had been diagnosed with the flu: “I was taken to [hospital] and was met by the BEST nurses and doctors… to find out what’s wrong.

“Y’all, I have the FLU and let me tell [you] it’s worse than Covid in my opinion,” she continued. “I’m on five different medications… please be careful. I wasn’t around a lot of people and have NO IDEA where it came from… enjoy y’all holiday AT HOME… you don’t want this.”

And she’s right. There are some symptoms that could make the flu seem like it’s worse than COVID and vice-versa.

Both influenza (flu) and COVID-19 are respiratory illnesses that can cause similar symptoms, making it difficult to distinguish between them. However, there are some key differences:
Cause:
Flu: Caused by influenza viruses (A, B, or H1N1)
COVID-19: Caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus
Symptoms:
Flu:
Fever, cough, sore throat, runny or stuffy nose, body aches, fatigue, headache, sometimes nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea
COVID-19:
Fever, cough, shortness of breath, loss of taste or smell, fatigue, muscle aches, headache, sometimes nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea
Complications:
Flu:
Can lead to pneumonia, bronchitis, and heart or kidney problems, especially in high-risk individuals
COVID-19:
Can lead to pneumonia, respiratory failure, multi-organ failure, and long-term health problems known as “long COVID”

Despite everything that she’s been through, including  “completely isolated” because her illness and mental struggles, she still usually ends her posts with, “I love y’all for real.”

And we love her back.

Tamar Braxton, mental health struggles, depression, anxiety, pulmonary emboli, thoracic outlet syndrome, health journey, advocacy

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