After opening up about her experiences with postnatal depression following the birth of her first child Luna back in 2016, Chrissy Teigen has revealed that she’s worried the condition might return when she gives birth to a son later this year – but that this time, she’s ‘so ready’ to counter it.
‘Do I worry about it with this little boy? I do,’ she told the audience at the Create & Cultivate Conference in Los Angeles, as part of a discussion with her friend and hairstylist Jen Atkin. ‘But I also know that when it does happen – if it does – I’m so ready for it. I have the perfect people around me for it. That’s why I stand for a real core group of people around me.’
The model, TV presenter and author went on to reveal that, following the birth of her daughter, it took months for her to even realise that her symptoms were those of postpartum depression.
‘I didn’t know I had it,’ she said. ‘I knew that I had an incredible life, and an incredible husband, and family, and all the resources necessary, and I knew that I was personally unhappy, but I didn’t think anything was wrong because I just assumed that that’s the way it was. You have a kid, you’re sad, you lose those endorphins, and that’s the way it is.’
Back in 2017, Chrissy shared her experiences with postnatal depression (which is estimated to affect around more than one in every 10 women within a year of giving birth) in a moving essay for Glamour magazine, motivated out of a desire to de-stigmatise the condition.
‘I had everything I needed to be happy. And yet, for much of the last year, I felt unhappy. What basically everyone around me – but me – knew up until December was this: I have postpartum depression. How can I feel this way when everything is so great? I’ve had a hard time coming to terms with that, and I hesitated to even talk about this,’ she wrote. ‘But it’s such a major part of my life and so, so many other women’s lives. It would feel wrong to write about anything else.'