Actress Gwyneth Paltrow Recalls How Post Partum Depression Took Her to a “Dark Place”

Mom of two, Gwyneth Paltrow isn’t afraid to open up about her terrible experience with postpartum depression when she had her second child.

The 45-year-old American actress, singer, and food writer talked about the dark event in her life with her mother Blythe Danner on her Goop Podcast Thursday, April, 26 titled “Gwyneth X Blythe: On Mothers and Daughters.”

“I had terrible postnatal depression, which I think it was really shocking to me because I never thought that I would be a person who got postnatal depression,” she said.

Paltrow who shares her two kids, Apple, 13, and Moses, 12, with ex-husband Chris Martin gives the Coldplay lead singer the credit for recognizing that she was going through the painful process of postpartum that often times happens with new mothers.

It wasn’t until Martin spoke to Paltrow that she realized she had postpartum depression.

“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.

”I was so euphoric when Apple was born, and I assumed it would happen with Mosey and it just…it took a while. I really went into a dark place,” she continued.

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This isn’t the first time Paltrow has talked openly about postpartum depression. She also wrote about it on her Goop website back in 2010.

In her post, Paltrow claimed she had postnatal depression for about five months and described it as “one of the darkest and most painfully debilitating chapters of my life.”

“I couldn’t connect with my son the way I had with my daughter and I couldn’t understand why. I couldn’t connect to anyone. I felt like a zombie. I felt very detached,” she revealed.

“I just didn’t know what was wrong with me. I couldn’t figure it out. It never occurred to me. I was mortified. ‘No I didn’t!’ And then I started researching what it was and the symptoms and I was like, ‘Oh, yes I do.’”

Paltrow had also spoken about her postpartum to Gold Housekeeping and told the publication,

“I couldn’t access my heart. I couldn’t access my emotions. I couldn’t connect,” she told the magazine in 2011.

It was terrible. The hardest part for me was acknowledging the problem. I thought postpartum depression meant you were sobbing every single day and incapable of looking after a child.

But there are different shades of it and depths of it, which is why I think it’s so important for women to talk about. It was a trying time. I felt like a failure.”

READ ALSO: How To Help Another Mum Deal With Postpartum Depression, PPD

In fact, Paltrow would often blame her feelings on her parenting abilities.

“I just thought it meant I was a terrible mother and a terrible person,” she told the publication.

 

Paltrow revealed her road to recovery involved an exercise regime and therapy. She wants women to not feel ashamed for going through postpartum and to seek help.

However, she said women shouldn’t be shamed for experiencing it.

“Luckily, [my case] was low grade enough that I didn’t have to be hospitalized, but it’s a very debilitating thing, and I think there’s so much shame around it and there shouldn’t be,” she told ET in 2015.

“It’s something that happens, it’s something that befalls many women after they have a baby, and for me, it ended up being a wonderful opportunity to explore some underlying issues that I think the depression kind of brought out.”

READ ALSO: “You’re not a bad mom” -Distressed Widower Writes Moving Note to Other Moms Battling PPD