Postpartum depression is something that many new moms go through but few talk about. Chrissy Teigen is no exception as she tells Glamour magazine readers in an open letter that she’s battled with depression after giving birth to her and John Legend’s daughter, Luna.
“A year ago, in April, John and I started our family together,” Chrissy shares. “We had our daughter, Luna, who is perfect. She is somehow exactly me, exactly John, and exactly herself. I adore her.”
Still, with all of the joy that parenthood brings, Chrissy was overwhelmed with sadness. “I had everything I needed to be happy. And yet, for much of the last year, I felt unhappy,” she explains. “What basically everyone around me—but me—knew up until December was this: I have postpartum depression.”
Although she didn’t know that despondency was her problem, Chrissy was aware that she wasn’t herself. “One thing that really got me was just how short I was with people,” she says of her attitude at work.
“I would be in my dressing room, sitting in a robe, getting hair and makeup done, and a crew member would knock on the door and ask: ‘Chrissy, do you know the lyrics to this song?’ And I would lose it. Or ‘Chrissy, do you like these cat ears, or these panda hands?’ And I’d be like: ‘Whatever you want. I don’t care. They would leave. My eyes would well up and I would burst into tears. My makeup artist would pat them dry and give me a few minutes.”
Things weren’t too much different at home. “I never left the house,” Teigen reveals. “Most days were spent on the exact same spot on the couch and rarely would I muster up the energy to make it upstairs for bed. John would sleep on the couch with me, sometimes four nights in a row. I started keeping robes and comfy clothes in the pantry so I wouldn’t have to go upstairs when John went to work. There was a lot of spontaneous crying.”
So how is Chrissy moving past the effects of postpartum depression? “I’m over a month into taking my antidepressant, and I just got the name of a therapist who I am planning to start seeing,” she shares.
“John has been incredible over the last nine months, bringing me my medicine and watching horrible reality TV with me,” Chrissy writes. “He is not the goofiest guy, but he has gone out of his way to indulge my sense of humor.”
John Legend and Chrissy Teigen’s daughter celebrates her first birthday in April.
