In the fall of 2016, Octomom resurfaced from an extended public hiatus for a brief round of interviews in which she sought to set the record straight on her infamous past. During one of the interviews, Octomom, who has reverted back to using her birth name, Natalie Suleman, told The Daily Mail that she “made the decision to ‘kill’ the Octomom character in March 2013 in a bid to save her life.” Suleman said, “The media created the character and I shamefully embraced it in 2009 out of scarcity and desperation to survive.”
In order to deal with what she viewed as her unwitting embrace of the Octomom “character,” Suleman said that she resorted to Xanax in order to numb her “deep toxic shame and self disgust.” Though she claims she never took more than she was prescribed, Suleman — who “tries to lead a natural, vegan lifestyle” — knew that the drugs were enabling her poor decision making. “I wasn’t able to exploit myself and do what I was doing without it, which became a problem – it wasn’t healthy,” she said. This means if she was going to kick her Xanax habit, she’d have to ditch the reason she acquired it in the first place, which meant no longer being famous.