Gwyneth Paltrow says she overcame postpartum depression without medications.
The actress, 46, has continued to be open about her mental health struggles after welcoming her second child, son Moses with ex-husband Chris Martin 12 years ago.
“I had postnatal depression, as you know, after my son. A doctor tried to put me on antidepressants and I thought, if I need them, then yes, I’ll come back to it,” Paltrow said during a special edition of her goop Podcast on Wednesday celebrating the 10th anniversary of her company.
Though she said, “they are lifesavers for certain people for sure,” Paltrow chose to search for alternative therapies.
“I thought, well, what if I went to therapy and I started exercising again, and I stopped drinking alcohol and I just gave myself a period of regeneration and I slept more? I really broke out of it,” the mother of two shared.
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In April, Paltrow revealed she still remembers the “dark place” she was in following Moses’ birth.
“It was really shocking to me because I never thought that I would be a person who got post-natal depression,” she said during a conversation with her mother Blythe Danner also for the goop Podcast.
Paltrow was even more taken aback because of her first pregnancy with daughter Apple, now 14. “I was so euphoric when Apple was born, and I assumed it would happen with Mosey and it just … it took a while. I really went into a dark place,” she recalled.
In fact, ex Martin was the first to recognize her postpartum depression symptoms.
“About four months into it, Chris came to me and said, ‘Something’s wrong. Something’s wrong.’ I kept saying, ‘No, no, I’m fine.’ But Chris identified it, and that sort of burst the bubble,” Paltrow told Good Housekeeping in 2011.
“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. It was a trying time. I felt like a failure,” she said.
Paltrow, who is engaged to producer Brad Falchuk, has also been open about not expanding her family.
In May, the star said the couple is not planning on having children together and how they’re happy with the blended family they’ve created with their kids from previous relationships.
“This is his second marriage … Neither of us wants more kids,” the mother of two said on an episode of Howard Stern‘s SiriusXM radio show.
“We’re on the same team,” Paltrow added of the pair’s decision to not have children together.
Falchuk shares son Brody and daughter Isabella with ex-wife Suzanne Bukinik, whom he was married to for 10 years before filing for divorce in March 2013.
“He’s fantastic,” Paltrow said of Falchuk, adding of their unique parenting dynamic, “It’s always tricky with kids and trying to gently blend families. It’s hard.”
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