Reese Witherspoon just opened up her experience with depression.
She suffered with the mental health condition as a teenager as well as when she entered motherhood and gave birth to her daughter Ava.
The Morning Show star also shared how her grandmother, Dorothea, had also suffered with depression
Reese’s mother warned her it could run in the family. “She had been this well-educated woman who was then left alone with two little kids while her husband went to work,” Reese told Harper’s Bazaar.
“She got really depressed. My mom was honest with me and said, ‘You need to be careful. This could be genetic,'” she added.
After Ava’s birth, Reese said the depression was “really bad,” as her mood fluctuated up and down. “In the first six months, I was simultaneously happy and depressed. I just cried all the time, I was up all night, I was exhausted. It was a hormone drop I didn’t expect, which I experienced right after birth and again when I stopped nursing six months later,” she said.
“Everyone has an opinion. It’s hard being a young mom and having people tell you how to be, how to react, how to give birth, how to nurse and how to feed your baby. It’s inundating,” the Legally Blonde talent explained.
Eventually, Reese confided in a good friend who encouraged her to seek professional help.
“I had the connections and the means to get to a doctor, a mental-health specialist, but a lot of people don’t. They struggle on their own and hide it,” she said.
She now credits the experience to her success, in part. “I was probably successful because I had so much anxiety. They go hand in hand,” she said.
“I had pressured myself to extreme levels to show up at work in a perfect way. We all now know – perfect is not attainable. It’s not sustainable. I stressed myself out in service of my job, and it got me really, really far. I’m rewarded for my anxiety and perfectionism,” Reese Witherspoon concluded.
