When postpartum depression took Gwyneth Paltrow into a 'dark place'

Actor opens up about one of the most painfully debilitating chapters of her life

Postpartum depression isn’t something every woman is very vocal about. However celebrities such as Gwyneth Paltrow aren’t afraid to open up about the emotions that run through their body after giving birth. The 45-year-old actor recently spoke about the subject during Thursday's episode of The Goop Podcast, reported E! News.

"I had terrible postnatal depression. It was really shocking to me because I never thought that I would be a person who got postnatal depression," Paltrow said. The Goop leader said she was "so euphoric" when her daughter Apple was born that she assumed she would feel the same way when she and her now-ex Chris Martin welcomed their son Moses. However, the Avengers: Infinity War star said that it “took a while” to overcome the feeling. "I really went into a dark place."



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."

She also told Good Housekeeping she "felt like a zombie" during this time. "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."

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 stated earlier. It wasn't until Martin spoke to her about it that she realised 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."



Still, Paltrow admitted she had a lot of misconceptions about it. "The hardest part for me was acknowledging the problem," she continued. "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."



Paltrow overcame her postpartum depression through therapy and exercise. 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 hospitalised 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 n 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."

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