Chrissy Teigen Opens Up About Postpartum Depression That Was a 'Sad Existence': 'There Were No Highs'

Chrissy Teigen is opening up about her struggles with postpartum depression after giving birth to her now-3-year-old daughter Luna.

Speaking with Glamour UK, the mother of two said that she didn’t realize she was dealing with postpartum depression until Luna was 3 months old.

“It was a sad existence,” she said of that period. “There were no highs. It was a flatline of life for a few months.”

Teigen, 34, said that she “put off getting it checked” because she wasn’t having negative feelings toward her daughter, but herself.

“You hear these horrific stories of people not seeing their child as theirs, or wanting to hurt them, and I never felt that way. That’s why I put off getting it checked as I hated myself, not my child,” she said. “I don’t know why I didn’t realize, as it was so obvious to everyone else!”

The Bring the Funny host said that husband John Legend knew what she was dealing with when she was diagnosed.

“I didn’t know it could sneak up so late or that it could happen to someone like me, where I have all the resources. I had nannies and my mom living with us,” the cookbook author continued. “You say you have it and people think, ‘Is she going to jump off a roof with her kid?’ They don’t know there are so many levels of it.”

Teigen recalled becoming “very introverted” as a result of the depression because of a “paralyzing anxiety of going out.”

“I lost my baby weight and more within a month. I posted a picture of myself making a Mother’s Day lunch. I look back at that photo and it is the thinnest I’ve ever looked,” the former model recalled.

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The social media maven said that she wasn’t worried about getting postpartum depression again with her son Miles “because we solved it.”

“It made it so much easier just knowing we would spot it immediately if it did happen again,” Teigen said of her second pregnancy. “When you are in it, you don’t realize what life is like outside the hole and so I wasn’t worried [with Miles] because we solved it. There are so many things with Miles, like not coming to me first when other people are around, that would have affected me if Luna had done the same. I thought she didn’t like me or want to be around me, but that was in my own head.”

Teigen first opened up about her struggles with postpartum depression with a personal essay for Glamour in 2017.

“To a lot of you, I think, I seem like the happiest person on the planet,” Teigen wrote, going on to explain that after she and Legend welcomed Luna in April 2016, she had everything she “needed to be happy.”

“And yet, for much of the last year, I felt unhappy. What basically everyone around me—but me—knew up until December was this: I have postpartum depression,” she wrote at the time.

Teigen has since spoken about how writing that essay opened her eyes to how many other women have similar experiences after giving birth.

“I didn’t really realize it until I’d written an article with Glamour magazine and spoken out about it, how many women are going through this,” she said on Today in May of last year. “I think more than anything I’ve ever done, more women on the street come up to me and talk about that article than anything else.”