Model and author Chrissy Teigen reveals her battles with mental health after becoming a mother two years ago
She has a reputation for speaking candidly about the realities of parenting, and now Chrissy Teigen has spoken openly about her battles with postpartum depression since becoming a mum.
Speaking in an interview with CBS, which aired on Friday 14 September, the 32-year-old author and model revealed that behind her seemingly “fairy tale life”, she suffered both emotional and physical pain after the birth of her daughter, Luna in 2016.
READ MORE: We need to talk about paternal depression
“My bones hurt. My wrists hurt. I would just be doing this all day,” she said. “I just felt everything was collapsing in and emotionally just feeling useless and icky.”
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Teigen added that her husband John Legend was a great support to her throughout this difficult period, admitting that he’d sleep on the couch with her “for days at a time” and ensured she had everything she needed to recover.
“He would put towels and my robes and pyjamas and stuff… we would put them in the pantry so I wouldn’t have to try and schlep myself upstairs to get dressed, or he would make a little bed on the couch with me,” she said.
The model gave birth to her second child, Miles, four months ago, but hasn’t suffered from postpartum depression this time around, attributing this to the fact she ate her placenta after the birth.
“It sounds ridiculous, but people have this belief that if you eat your placenta, it gets all those nutrients that you lost when you were pregnant, rather than just losing them immediately and losing that rush of endorphins.”
“By taking these dry placenta pills, you can kind of keep this energy up and be weaned off that feeling more.”
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“I don’t think I can have you eating your placenta on primetime,” joked CBS host Rita Braver, to which Teigen responded, “Really? That’s not a normal thing? I’m in LA, it’s very normal. They grill it here!”
Chrissy also opened up about her mental health in a Glamour op-ed in March 2017, in which she said: “I just didn’t think it could happen to me… but postpartum does not discriminate. I couldn’t control it. And that’s part of the reason it took me so long to speak up.”
READ MORE: Could you be suffering from postnatal anxiety?
“I think people on social media are my friends,” she added in her interview on CBS, explaining her decision to be open about her mental health. “And I think they deserved to know. I don’t know, is that so weird?”
Watch Chrissy Teigen’s interview with CBS here.
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