Gwyneth Paltrow Recalls How Postpartum Depression Took Her to a "Dark Place"

During an episode of "The Goop Podcast" the actress opened up having postnatal depression after giving birth to her son Moses

By Elyse Dupre Apr 27, 2018 7:33 PMTags

Gwyneth Paltrow isn't afraid to open up about her experience with postpartum depression.

The 45-year-old actress spoke about the subject during Thursday's episode of "The Goop Podcast."

"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.

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 feeling "took a while."

"I really went into a dark place," Paltrow said.

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 told the publication.

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,'" she told Good Housekeeping. "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 told the magazine she 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 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."

Listen to the full podcast episode here.