Alanis Morissette Gets Very Real About Having Postpartum Depression 3 Times
Alanis Morissette shares that she’s suffered from PPD after all three of her pregnancies
Singer and mother-of-three Alanis Morissette is opening up about her struggle with postpartum depression and anxiety in a blog post she published this week, sharing with fans about all of the nuances and “many tentacles to this experience.”
Morissette welcomed her youngest child, Winter, this past August and has two other kids, Ever Imre, nine, and Onyx, three. She said she’d share more once she’s got her “wits about her” again but did reassure fans, “I have answers and protocols and solutions and RXs to be sure.”
But given the intensity of postpartum depression, the singer shared she is experiencing, “Sleep deprivation. Fogginess. Physical pain. Isolation. Anxiety. Cortisol. Recovery from childbirth.” She also shared that this is the third time she’s gone through this experience and that she knows there is light at the end of the darkness. “I saw how things got richer after i came through it the last two times. i have my eye on that prize again…even as i drag my ass through the molasses,” Morissette wrote.
According to the CDC, research shows that nationally, about one in nine women experience symptoms of postpartum depression and that number can be higher depending on where you live, your age, race, and ethnicity. Symptoms will vary by person but can include crying more often than usual, feeling angry, withdrawn, feeling disconnected from your baby, worrying you may hurt your baby, and feelings of guilt.
Morissette said the process of bringing a new baby home and integrating him into the family, as well as marriage, PTSD triggers, and overstimulation play a role but that she’s “attempting to crawl back to some semi-recognizable configuration. Some around my relationship with needing. Reaching out. Seeing how great I am at setting boundaries in some areas, but how blind-spot-ty I have been with them in others.”
She also said she struggles with an addiction to work which causes her to over-give, over-serve, and overdo. “At worst: beautiful human qualities that are on 11 in a way that the body ultimately can’t sustain. the #InvisibleLoad with today’s normalized cluttered lifestyle taking on epic proportions,” she wrote.
She isn’t kidding about work. She’s got a podcast, new music, songwriting, producing, performing, and an ever-growing family on top of it all. It’s easy enough (though exhausting) to try to weather through it all but PPD makes everything a fog. It’s like a giant weight is being pressed on your chest, leaving you unable to move or feel or think.
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Morissette says she has tons of support, some set up in advance in case she experienced PPD again, but that “PPD is still a sneaky monkey with a machete — working its way through my psyche and body and days and thoughts and bloodwork levels.” She also wants other new moms to know they are not alone, ending her post by saying, “i love you. i am here. with you. we’re not alone.”
