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Keira Knightley has opened up about her experience with postnatal depression.
Appearing on Giovanna Fletcher’s Happy Mum Happy Baby podcast, the Woman in Cabin 10 actress, 40, candidly detailed her experience with postnatal depression, admitting that she experienced a “hormone crash” that led to her going to therapy.
“I remember kind of a hormonal crisis. I had an amazing hormonal high, and then my hormones went down really quickly. I think I had postpartum depression for a while after that,” she recalled. “I went through a lot of therapy about a year, maybe a few years later, to deal with all of that. But it was confusing. Not having that physical aspect of it made everything even more confusing.”
“I didn’t sleep at all for three years and it was a completely normal birth. There were no major complications. It went well, especially for a first birth. The baby was fine. I was fine too,” she added. “Everything was going well. And yet, even though everything was perfectly fine, this huge life-changing event happened.”
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She then reflected on her post-baby body, saying she was “surprised” that it didn’t bounce back quickly, but didn’t mind wearing larger jeans.
“I was very surprised it wasn’t,” she said of her figure. “I always had a body that didn’t have to do much of anything, and it was just one of those skinny bodies, you know, and it came back.”
“And it wasn’t. And it wasn’t. So, yeah, I was surprised, but I also thought there was something more important, I’m just going to buy a larger size jeans,” she continued. “So I was wearing clothes without thinking ahead of time that I would be able to wear them.”
Mr Knightley recalled the public debate at the time and said it was “terrible” that people were focusing on different things.
“At that point, I felt like the public discussion around this was terrible,” she said. “Can I go back to jeans? Go back to work? Nothing’s happening. Just keep going. I’m going out. It felt like there was no discussion, no interest. It was just, ‘When are you going to go back to jeans?'”
“And I thought, what? I’m on another planet. I just traveled from one planet to another. I didn’t care about the jeans,” she continued.
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The mother of daughters Delilah, six, and Edie, 10, recently told BBC Radio 4 that her children were eventually joining social media and spending too much time on their devices.
“I think it’s very scary because it’s an unregulated place,” said Knightley, who shares the children with her husband, James Righton. “And I think for kids, an unregulated space is something I want to protect.”
“So social media is not allowed in my house,” she explained. “If you can’t see what you’re looking at, you’re not allowed to use it on your device…”
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She added that she “doesn’t know” if it’s the right thing to do, and “I don’t know” how long it can go on with today’s technology.
As BBC Radio 4 presenter Anna Foster wondered how Knightley would react to the increasingly intense “peer pressure”, the Love Actually actress admitted she and her husband “haven’t had that yet”, thanks in part to the school system.
“The schools we go to have a ‘social media-free’ childhood, and pretty much all parents do the same,” she said.
“So I think there was a huge push from most of the parents at the school and I think most of us agree that this is the path we should go down,” she added. “But obviously not everyone, because this is a polarizing issue for a lot of people.”
