Hayden Panettiere on Her Postpartum Depression: “I Was So Lucky and Blessed. And I Was Just a Mess.”

“I felt unfixable. I felt like there was no way out of it,” Hayden said. “I was trying to process the idea that maybe I was going to be depressed like this for the rest of my life. And this was just the new normal. So that was terrifying.”

She’d checked herself into rehab when her daughter Kaya was 4 months old. They treated her for alcoholism. Nobody at the facility ever mentioned postpartum depression.

Hayden told the story to Jay Shetty on his podcast OnPurpose, promoting her new memoir This is Me, A Reckoning.

She’d had no idea what was happening to her.

“I’d never been around anybody who had ever experienced postpartum depression before. I’d never heard it spoken about. My mom, the females in my life, nobody ever said anything about it. All of their stories were of these beautiful positive moments of joy and love.”

“I was full of stress and anxiety all the time. And what I was doing to suppress those emotions was not normal and it was not healthy. I was miserable. I was in tears all the time.”

She’d started drinking to cope.

“I was self-medicating and looking for relief at the bottom of a bottle. I needed to numb. I needed my brain to take a trip. I needed to go on a vacation. I needed it to not think about all these ugly things for just a little while.”

It took her 10 months of researching it on her own before she could put a name to what she was going through.

When she first opened up about her postpartum depression on Live with Kelly and Michael in 2015, Neutrogena ended her 10-year endorsement deal.

“Of all the things that I had been caught doing, that being the thing that they drew the line on as immoral was shocking to me,” Hayden said. “It made me realize and understand exactly what people thought of women who experience postpartum depression.”

By 2018, after years of repeat treatment stays, Hayden gave full custody of Kaya to her father, retired heavyweight champion Wladimir Klitschko, so she could focus on getting healthy. Kaya went to live full-time in Europe.

“The idea that anybody would think that I would just give away my child and be okay with it is heartbreaking. Couldn’t be further from the truth,” Hayden said. “I went like mother lion. I would have burnt the world down for my child.”

By the time Hayden had gotten healthy enough to consider bringing Kaya home, Kaya had built a full life in Europe. She speaks 5 languages, rides horses, and is surrounded by family and friends.

“I felt like it would have been unfair of me and selfish of me to try to pull her out of this life she’d been living.”

Kaya is now 11 and lives in Europe full-time. Hayden has been answering “she abandoned her daughter” comments for years.

This is what Hayden said she wants people to understand:

“That it’s real. That it’s not something we make up. It’s not something we want. It’s not that we’ve lost our marbles. We’re not lying when we tell you something’s wrong. We’re in tears for absolutely no reason. We don’t have control over this and this would be the last thing we’d ever want to experience or go through.”

“We want to be with our brand new child and be filled with joy and feel like the luckiest person in the world and capture every moment. For anyone to think otherwise is just misinformed.”

“We’re already in pain. One of the worst possible things in the world to happen to a woman is already happening to her. The last thing we need is the icing on the cake of feeling so judged and in such a negative way.”