Reese Witherspoon Details Her Bouts With ‘Severe’ Postpartum Depression
Actress Reese Witherspoon is opening about and detailing her bouts with “severe” postpartum depression, and warns this is something all parents should prepare for.
While she’s been candid in the past, Witherspoon now reveals her experiences dealing with depression during her pregnancies. Speaking with Jameela Jamil, Witherspoon shares, “After each child, I had a different experience. [With] one kid, I had kind of mild postpartum, and [with] one kid, I had severe postpartum where I had to take pretty heavy medication because I just wasn’t thinking straight at all. And then I had one kid where I had no postpartum at all.”
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Witherspoon, 44 and the mother of Ava, 20, Deacon, 16, and Tennessee, 6, continues to explain, “We don’t understand the kind of hormonal roller coaster that you go on when you stop nursing. No one explained that to me. I was 23 years old when I had my first baby and nobody explained to me that when you wean a baby, your hormones go into the toilet. I felt more depressed than I’d ever felt in my whole life. It was scary.”
Later in the interview, the ‘Legally Blonde‘ actress recalls not having any “guidance or help” during her bouts with postpartum depression; instead, she said she “white-knuckled back” to herself.
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She adds, “I think hormones are so understudied and not understood. I kept reaching out to my doctors for answers. There just isn’t enough research about what happens to women’s bodies and the hormonal shifts that we have aren’t taken as seriously as I think they should be. I have deep compassion for women who are going through that. Postpartum [depression] is very real.”