Kylie Jenner is opening up about her experience with postpartum depression. In a newly published interview with British Vogue, the reality star and mom of two shared how the medical condition has impacted her life—and how her experience differed between her first and second child.
Postpartum depression is a common condition that affects roughly 1 in 7 new parents, according to the Cleveland Clinic. This type of depression occurs after childbirth, and for those who’ve experienced it before, the risk of recurrence during subsequent pregnancies increases by 30 percent. Symptoms can vary widely and may include emotional ups and downs, crying, irritability, and fatigue, along with intense feelings of guilt.
“Stormi’s lasted a year,” Jenner told the outlet, referring to her experience with prolonged postpartum depression after her daughter’s birth, adding that her son Aire’s lasted for a similar amount of time. “I’m going to be 27, and I’m finally feeling like myself again, and [looking back] I think, being pregnant, I wore sweatpants every day, I didn’t have time to figure out even some of the little things in my life, and then postpartum lasted a year. Mentally, it’s really hard. Hormonally, it’s really hard. I didn’t know how to dress,” she said.
“It hit me differently both times,” she continued. “Probably with my son it was major baby blues, so I was just so emotional over things that I probably wouldn’t be that emotional about [typically]. On the phone with my mom all day hysterically crying, saying, ‘I can’t figure out his name.’ Now my advice to all my friends having children is pick the name before, because when the hormones hit you can’t make decisions. You can’t,” she said. “When I met him, he was just the most beautiful thing to me and I couldn’t believe just how perfect he was. I felt like such a failure that I couldn’t name him. He deserved so much more than that. It just really triggered me.”
Now that she’s on the other side, Jenner is able to articulate the best parts of motherhood, one being that her children have become her grounding force—a blessing in her whirlwind life, where constant tabloid headlines watch and critique her every move. “No matter what I’m going through or what I look like or what the internet writes about me that day, I come home and my kids just love me unconditionally. They’re just obsessed with me and that’s taught me to walk through life a little easier. I’m like, ‘OK, well I have these little humans at home that need me and love me and think I’m the most perfect person in the world, so I don’t really need validation from outside sources.'”
