In the past few years, we've talked a lot more about postpartum depression, but that's not the only mental health obstacle that new moms face both during and after pregnancy. And now Grey's Anatomy star Camilla Luddington is opening up about her postnatal anxiety and how it affected her as a mom of two.
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Camilla first realized that she had anxiety after becoming a mom
As Camilla said in an interview with Wondermind, when her son Lucas was born in April 2020, she realized that she had postpartum anxiety — and that she'd felt the same way when her firstborn daughter, Hayden, 6, was born, too.
"I now look back and realize I had postpartum anxiety, which I didn't know was a thing," she said. "I knew about postpartum depression, and I knew I didn't have that, but I had so much anxiety."
She realized she needed to seek therapy
Camilla lost her mom at a young age — when she was just 19 years old — and the postpartum anxiety had her "super triggered" that the same thing was going to happen to her.
"It can bring up constant worst-case-scenario [thinking] for you, where you feel like, 'Oh, I will die young because that's what happened to me.' That's what I knew. That was my reality," she admitted.
She described the way she felt as "super intense"
"I was like, OK, I need to do this for myself. I need to gift this to myself, gift this to my family, and go seek therapy," she said.
Postpartum anxiety is more common than you might think. According to the Cleveland Clinic, it may affect up to 21% of new moms.
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Now she wants to be as open as possible about her mental health
It wasn't something her own parents discussed, so she wants to change that for the children she shares with husband Matthew Alan.
"I just want to be able to be open and [want them to] understand: 'Hey, mom has anxiety,'" she said. "I had PMDD [premenstrual dysphoric disorder] after my son was born, which I had never experienced before and didn't know could happen. I want them to know that it doesn't [show] weakness to seek help."
Good for her for opening up about such a tough topic
It's not easy to talk about mental health, especially when it involves pregnancy or the way we parent. But the only way we fight that stigma is by talking about it, and there's no doubt Camilla helped other moms going through similar experiences feel less alone.
