Adele, Gwyneth Paltrow, and More Celebrities Open Up About Postpartum Depression

“I love my son more than anything, but on a daily basis, if I have a minute or two, I wish I could do whatever the fuck I wanted, whenever I want. Every single day I feel like that.” That is Adele, discussing her battle with postpartum depression for the first time in an interview with Vanity Fair. There is a powerful taboo attached to the overwhelmingly common condition—affecting roughly one in eight women, according to the Centers for Disease Control—and it’s seldom talked about, leaving the majority of mothers to struggle through it alone. But the British singer joins a string of women who are overcoming that stigma, sharing their experiences and fleshing out the importance of speaking about it. From Gwyneth Paltrow to Drew Barrymore, here are five celebrities opening up the conversation now.

Adele
“My knowledge of postpartum—or postnatal, as we call it in England—is that you don’t want to be with your child; you’re worried you might hurt your child; you weren’t doing a good job,” Adele explained to Vanity Fair of that common misconception. “But I was obsessed with my child. I felt very inadequate; I felt like I’d made the worst decision of my life . . . . It can come in many different forms.”

Gwyneth Paltrow
Paltrow didn’t experience postpartum until the birth of Moses, her second child. “I couldn’t believe it wasn’t the same; I just thought it meant I was a terrible mother and a terrible person,” she said. “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.”

Brooke Shields
Famously, Shields was one of the first actresses to reveal her struggle with postpartum—and one of the first to advise speaking out. “It has nothing to do with your love for [your children],” she said in 2005. “Pay attention to the feelings that you’re feeling and talk about it and ask your doctor.”

Drew Barrymore
Last year, Barrymore discussed her six-month experience with postpartum, following the birth of her daughter Frankie. “It’s a different type of overwhelming with the second,” she said. “I really got under the cloud.”

Amanda Peet
“I had fairly serious postpartum depression,” said Peet in 2008. “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,’” she went on. “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.”

 

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