16 celebrities who struggled with postpartum depression

Alanis Morissette has had a years-long battle with postpartum depression. In a recent interview with Self  she explained how she’s fought it twice and will be preparing to tackle it again when baby number three is born. “For me I would just wake up and feel like I was covered in tar and it wasn’t the first time I’d experienced depression so I just thought Oh, well, this feels familiar, I’m depressed, I think,” she said. “And then simultaneously, my personal history of depression where it was so normalized for me to be in the quicksand, as I call it, or in the tar. It does feel like tar, like everything feels heavy.”

She previously opened up in an interview with People about how 14 months after the birth of her daughter Onyx Solace, her postpartum depression was crippling. “There are days I’m debilitated to the point where I can barely move… As a kid, I imagined having children and being with an amazing partner. This is a whole other wrench I didn’t anticipate.” 

Although Sarah had her daughter back in September 2009, she spoke out about her time spent suffering through postpartum depression after her daughter’s birth later on. She posted about it on Instagram writing, “Having kids is wonderful, and life changing, and rarely what you’re prepared for. I love my children more than anything in the world. But like a lot of women, I too struggled with postpartum depression after my first baby was born. I got help, and made it through, and every day since has been the best gift I could ever have asked for. To those of you going through this, know that you’re not alone and that it really does get better. And if you believe that postpartum depression should be covered by healthcare, please take a moment and go to callmecongress.com today, find your rep’s numbers and let them know. #NotAPreExistingCondition” She and hubby Freddie Prinze Jr. are also parents to their son, Rocky, who was born in September 2012.

After giving birth to daughter Luna in April 2016, Chrissy struggled with PPD, but only recently spoke out about it in an open letter in Glamour. “I had everything I needed to be happy. And yet, for much of the last year, I felt unhappy. What basically everyone around me—but me—knew up until December was this: I have postpartum depression…I looked at my doctor, and my eyes welled up because I was so tired of being in pain. Of sleeping on the couch. Of waking up throughout the night. Of throwing up. Of taking things out on the wrong people. Of not enjoying life. Of not seeing my friends. Of not having the energy to take my baby for a stroll. My doctor pulled out a book and started listing symptoms. And I was like, “Yep, yep, yep.” I got my diagnosis: postpartum depression and anxiety…I felt selfish, icky, and weird saying aloud that I’m struggling. Sometimes I still do…I’m speaking up now because I want people to know it can happen to anybody and I don’t want people who have it to feel embarrassed or to feel alone.” Read her full story here.

Drew Barrymore’s struggle with PPD lasted for about six months. “I didn’t have postpartum the first time so I didn’t understand it because I was like, ‘I feel great!’ The second time, I was like, ‘Oh, whoa, I see what people talk about now. I understand,’ It’s a different type of overwhelming with the second. I really got under the cloud…I just got right on the idea of, where do I need to be the most? Fifty-fifty would be ideal but life doesn’t work like that. Life is messy. It was just really challenging and I felt overwhelmed. I made a lot of decisions and I definitely changed my work life to suit my parenthood.”

“[Postpartum] is something a lot of women experience,” the actress said on Live! with Kelly and Michael. “When [they] about postpartum depression, you think it’s ‘I feel negative feelings towards my child, I want to injure or hurt my child.’ I’ve never, ever had those feelings. Some women do. But you don’t realize how broad of a spectrum you can really experience that on. It’s something that needs to be talked about. Women need to know that they’re not alone, and that it does heal…There’s a lot of misunderstanding. There are a lot of people out there that think it’s not real, that it’s not true, that it’s something that’s made up in their minds, that ‘Oh, it’s hormones.’ They brush it off. It’s something that’s completely uncontrollable. It’s really painful and it’s really scary, and women need a lot of support.”

“When my son, Moses, came into the world in 2006, I expected to have another period of euphoria following his birth,” Gwyneth Paltrow shares on her website, GOOP. “Instead I was confronted with one of the darkest and most painfully debilitating chapters of my life.” In an interview with Good Housekeeping, she elaborates, “I felt like a zombie. I couldn’t access my heart. I couldn’t access my emotions. I couldn’t connect. It was terrible. It was the exact opposite of what had happened when Apple was born…I couldn’t believe it wasn’t the same. I just thought it meant I was a terrible mother and a terrible person…About four months into it, Chris came to me and said, ‘Something’s wrong. Something’s wrong.’ I kept saying, ‘No, no, I’m fine.’ But Chris identified it, and that sort of burst the bubble.” 

Angelina Jolie never officially said she experienced postpartum depression after the birth of her twins, Knox and Vivienne. But her alleged struggle made headlines two months after they arrived, in 2008.  

“Angelina slips into depression mode all the time,” a source said. “She has been trying to control her emotions around her older children, but her mood swings have been hard on the entire family…She has been staying in bed most of the time, all she does is sleep. She has little energy and has to force herself to remember to eat because she is still breastfeeding. She cries at the drop of a hat and laughs at inappropriate times.”

“One moment, tremendous happiness; the next, fatigue sets in, and I cried for no reason, and then that took care of itself,” Celine Dion said of her twins’ births. “Some of the first days after I came home, I was a little outside myself. I had no appetite, and that bothered me. My mother remarked that she noticed I had moments of lifelessness, but reassured me that this was entirely normal. It’s for things like that after having a baby that mothers really need emotional support.”

Britney Spears reportedly suffered from postpartum depression following the births of her two sons. According to an editor at People, her 2007 meltdown was a result of her struggles with bipolar disorder and PPD. 

“I had a fairly serious postpartum depression,” Amanda Peet said in Gotham magazine in 2008. “I think it was because I had a really euphoric pregnancy.” Peet admitted she felt “sleep-deprived beyond belief” and her euphoria “came crashing down” when her daughter arrived.

“I want to be honest about it because I think there’s still so much shame when you have mixed feelings about being a mom instead of feeling this sort of ‘bliss.,’” said Peet. “I think a lot of people still really struggle with that, but it’s hard to find other people who are willing to talk about it.”

“The fear of not knowing what I’m doing,” mom of one Vanessa Lachey wrote in a blog post entitled “Inside Story: My Experience with Baby Blues. “The fear of ‘messing up’ this little boy. The fear of being responsible for a human being and not knowing any ‘life’ experiences to compare moments with him to. No matter how many books you read, NOTHING prepares you better than the real thing. I felt lost, unloved, alone and at my wits end. It’s weird, too, because I have an amazing and supportive husband, his loving family and wonderful friends.”

“I felt like NO ONE understood me,” she continued. “No one knows my thoughts, my fears, my wishes… heck, I didn’t even know my own wishes. Nick would say, ‘What can I do?’ and I’d say, ‘I don’t know!’ And it’s true! I didn’t know!”

“I went through a really hard time – not right after the baby, but when [Coco] turned six months. I couldn’t sleep,” the Friends actress said on USA Today. “My heart was racing. And I got really depressed. I went to the doctor and found out my hormones had been pummeled.”

Brooke Shields wrote an entire memoir about her experience, Down Came the Rain: My Journey With Postpartum Depression. She writes candidly about her daughter, Rowan throughout the book:

“Rowan kept crying, and I began to dread the moment when Chris would bring her to me. Although I didn’t dislike her, I wasn’t sure I wanted her living with us. Every time I have been near a baby, any baby, I have always wanted to hold the child. I didn’t feel like I wanted to get too close to Rowan.”

“I thought I might try to escape or wouldn’t be able to stop myself from swallowing a bottle of pills. I even thought I’d welcome being kidnapped. These were strange, irrational fears that still felt real to me.”

“I have come so far in my love for and appreciation of my unique, incredible child. Instead of feeling numb to her or envisioning her being hurt in some way, I now crave her and want to protect her with my life.”

The actress revealed her PPD struggles in her book Rinnivation: Getting Your Best Life Ever.

“I set out to write a diet and fitness book period and that was about it. That isn’t exactly who I am, I’m much more than that. I just started to open up and it became this cathartic event… People don’t talk about this. It’s very, very scary and vulnerable. I had visions of knives and guns. I made Harry hide all the sharp knives and take the gun out of the house because I had visions of killing everybody. Now how horrific is that? I wanted share it because I think women are so shamed by this and feel so horrible… I found help and got through it.”

“Post-partum depression is hard to describe—the way the body and mind and spirit fracture and crumble in the wake of what most believe should be a celebratory time,” Bryce Dallas Howard wrote on goop. “I cringed when I watched my interview [about] on television because of my inability to share authentically what I was going through, what so many women go through. I fear more often than not, for this reason alone, we choose silence. And the danger of being silent means only that others will suffer in silence and may never be able to feel whole because of it.”

“Do I wish I had never endured post-partum depression?” she continued. “Absolutely. But to deny the experience is to deny who I am. I still mourn the loss of what could have been, but I also feel deep gratitude for those who stood by me, for the lesson that we must never be afraid to ask for help, and for the feeling of summer that still remains.”

The “Hello” singer opened up to Vanity Fair about PPD following the birth of her son: “I was obsessed with my child. I felt very inadequate; I felt like I’d made the worst decision of my life,” she confessed. “I had really bad postpartum depression after I had my son, and it frightened me,” she said. “I didn’t talk to anyone about it. I was very reluctant.”

Read more: Parenting through severe postpartum depression Chrissy Teigen writes an open letter about her postpartum depression Recognizing the signs of postpartum depression