It\u2019s never an easy thing to say out loud, so good on Keira Knightley for speaking out this week about her experience of postnatal depression (PND) after the birth of her first child, Edie (now ten). <\/p>\n
Being interviewed by Giovanna Fletcher<\/a> on her podcast Happy Mum Happy Baby, the actress and mother of two described the \u201chormone crash\u2019\u2019 she experienced soon after the birth, which she believes led to postnatal depression. <\/p>\n Knightley\u2019s daughter was born rapidly \u2014 just 45 minutes after she was induced \u2014 causing her to tear, which she couldn\u2019t entirely feel. \u201cIt\u2019s a really weird one that, when you\u2019ve taken the drugs,\u201d she told Fletcher. \u201cI mean, thank you for the drugs, but I think the recovery, because you haven\u2019t felt [the birth], is incredibly confusing. So the battered nature of my body afterwards \u2026 It didn\u2019t make sense. There was a crash down, and then I think it was postnatal depression.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2022 Keira Knightley: \u2018I went mad. I just managed to hide it\u2019<\/a><\/p>\n The too-fast delivery, the ensuing chaos, the bodily injury leading to a psychological detachment \u2014 Knightley\u2019s account was all too relatable. I suffered postnatal depression in 2016 after the birth of my first child. <\/p>\n My son came out in under an hour and I tore badly. The epidural didn\u2019t work, so unlike Knightley I felt everything. Then I was badly stitched up by an inexperienced midwife, and had to go back later to have the stitching corrected and a huge knot cut off. I joked at the time that if men birthed babies through their penises, there would be a Nobel prize for penis repair; a vagina seemed less important. I was cracking jokes, but I wasn\u2019t fine.<\/p>\n The visceral memories of the months that followed haunt me still. I didn\u2019t know what was wrong with me, and I felt upside down, completely bombarded and broken. I felt detached from my baby. Breastfeeding was agony; my nipples bled and scabbed, and I started to hate my son\u2019s crying mouth \u2014the wide, gaping need of him. <\/p>\n I felt resentful about sharing my body, when all it was bringing me was pain. While he was feeding I often let out a silent, agonised scream at the ceiling. I felt bitterly, horribly alone and abused. All of it felt so wrong.<\/p>\n \u2022 Read more expert advice on healthy living, fitness and wellbeing<\/a><\/p>\n The trouble was \u2014 it didn\u2019t seem like depression. I wasn\u2019t sitting around crying all the time. My PND manifested as rage: I was so angry I couldn\u2019t see straight. I had a blind, mad fury that made me hate my husband and avoid my friends, not to mention going nuclear at random people who I perceived to be offending me or getting in my way. I see now that I was behaving like a cornered animal, lashing out in self-defence because I was so frightened underneath.<\/p>\n One day I was supposed to have afternoon tea with friends at a posh hotel. I arrived in the foyer and saw them waiting for me in that serene room, cups and saucers laid out, fancy waiters circling; I turned and left. <\/p>\n I had no idea how to get a buggy through the gaps between the chairs, and I couldn\u2019t bring myself to rupture the scene with my barely held-together presentation of a woman in control. I texted my friends that I had forgotten a doctor\u2019s appointment, and instead I went home and breastfed, crying.<\/p>\n \u2022 \u2018Motherhood is all-out f***ing war\u2019<\/a><\/p>\n Knightley described her sleep deprivation, which she believes contributed to her poor mental state. It\u2019s no surprise. Sleep is key to healing, and month after month of being denied such a basic need \u2014 there\u2019s a reason it\u2019s used as torture. <\/p>\n Knightley described feeling as though she \u201ccould hear the trees\u2019\u2019, like she was living in a \u201cwhirlwind, a wind tunnel of experience and emotion\u201d. I felt wired as well as angry, and hypersensitive to the simplest of things, as though all my nerve endings had been snipped off. <\/p>\n I used to walk down to the sea near my home in Brighton and stare at the waves crashing. I thought I could just let myself fall in, and that might help. I wasn\u2019t consciously thinking of suicide, but wasn\u2019t death just like a really long sleep? If I were dead, at least I could rest.<\/p>\n But even though I was on fire inside, from the outside it was pretty much business as usual. The baby was fed and clean. We were both dressed. I was working, doing freelance writing jobs. I was careful to display functionality and success to my friends and wider family. <\/p>\n \u2022 Neil Gray shares wife\u2019s ordeal after damning maternity report<\/a><\/p>\n I was so scared to look like I was failing at motherhood, so really no one apart from my husband (and the odd stranger who got it in the neck) would have known there was anything wrong. It was my husband\u2019s first experience of parenthood too \u2014 he didn\u2019t know what the new version of our normal should be. <\/p>\n It took me months to work out that I was ill. It was over a full breakdown in the Brighton Marina branch of Five Guys, where I sobbed into a bottle of beer, that my husband and I finally, finally realised it might be time to seek some sort of help. <\/p>\n If only we knew more about the hormones involved in childbirth, and how and when they might take effect, we could have been better prepared. I wrote a book about my experience, years later, for which I interviewed neuroscientists and psychologists, trying to get some insight into exactly what goes on in women\u2019s brains during pregnancy and new motherhood. <\/p>\n It is an area that is very underresearched, but there are surges of certain hormones that occur at various points in each trimester (for example, a cortisol surge around week 26 of pregnancy, to enable foetal lung development), resulting in very real feelings for women. Imagine if we were better informed and knew what to expect.<\/p>\n