Laravel Carbon Group by Month

Can anyone see what I'm doing wrong?

I'm trying to output all the months but group them so they are unique.

$months = NewsItem::select(DB::raw('MONTH("created_at") as month'))->groupBy('month')->get();
return $months;

I'm getting the following back

{"month":null}

In my database I have five news articles all created_at 05/01/2017 so it's right that I only get one response but I'm not getting the number of the month back?

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