No one had told her there was another option.
Hayden Panettiere gave birth to her daughter Kaya in 2014 and expected to feel that instant love everyone talks about. It didn’t come. Instead, a void appeared that she didn’t know how to name, and she tried to cover it up with Fireball, a cinnamon whisky that, according to her own account, eased things a little and then made everything worse. Over time, she realized she couldn’t even tell where alcohol ended and postpartum depression began.
The numbers explain why so many women feel as alone as she did: 1 in 8 experiences symptoms after giving birth, and more than half of pregnant women with depression never receive treatment. Panettiere put it bluntly: she never had negative feelings toward her daughter; she only knew she was deeply depressed.