Actress Hayden Panettiere opened up about her experience with postpartum depression.
The “Heroes” alum made the comments during an interview with E! News’ “The Rundown.”
“I wish I knew about postpartum depression. I wish I knew to look out for it,” she told host Erin Lim Rhodes. “I just thought there was something seriously wrong with me, so I thought, ‘Fireball will fix this—duh!’ And it didn’t. It does for a moment, but then it makes everything worse,” Panettiere said, referring to a brand of whiskey.
“And then it hurts for you,” she continued. “You’re like, ‘I should be able to get over this all by myself.'”
“I wish somebody told me that that was a possibility, told me it’s OK if you birth your child and you’re not immediately like, ‘Oh my God, I love you more than anything in the entire world!'” Panettiere said. “It’s OK and not abnormal if [your baby] comes out and it’s a blob, and you’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is like a crazy little creation that I’m going to love when I get to know you.'”
The actress shares daughter Kaya, 8, with her ex Wladimir Klitschko. She previously talked about battling substance abuse.
“I could relate to a lot of those storylines like the alcoholism and postpartum depression. They hit close to home,” she said in 2022 of her role on the hit drama “Nashville.”
“People around me were more concerned about my usage of alcohol than they ever were about the postpartum depression,” she went on.
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The “Scream 6” star said this affected her relationship with Klitschko.
“He didn’t want to be around me. I didn’t want to be around me,” the actress said. “But with the opiates and alcohol I was doing anything to make me feel happy for a moment. Then I’d feel worse than I did before. I was in a cycle of self-destruction.”
“Once you’re the identified patient as the alcoholic and not as a girl, a woman going through postpartum depression then they don’t believe anything that comes outta your mouth,” she added. “It’s frustrating. It’s heartbreaking. You wanna break down and cry, which makes you look even worse. But not being believed, I think to anybody not being believed is — when they’re telling the truth — is painful.”
“I never had the feeling that I wanted to harm my child, but I didn’t want to spend any time with her,” Panettiere said of her initial experience with becoming a mother.