Near-perfect life came to an abrupt end for star when she had her first baby. Kate Holmquist looks at Shields's frank account of postnatal depression
Brooke Shields had hardly a day of self-doubt in all her charmed life. Until she had a baby.
With the birth of her daughter, this admittedly career-driven, perfectionist and slightly obsessive woman fell apart. Exhausted from an emergency C-section in which she nearly lost her womb due to uncontrolled bleeding, Shields felt "frozen and numb" as she held her newborn daughter, Rowan.
"I was in a bizarre state of mind, experiencing feelings that ranged from embarrassment to stoicism to melancholy to shock, practically at once. I didn't feel at all joyful, but attributed this to being tired and needing to recover physically," she writes in her superb account of postnatal depression, Down Came the Rain: A Mother's Story of Depression and Recovery (Michael Joseph, London, £12.99).
Within two weeks of giving birth, Shields was telling herself that she had made a mistake becoming a mother. When she heard her daughter cry for her breast, Shield fantasised that she could see the baby hitting the wall with a splat and falling to the floor. Her anguish intensified until she began to feel the urge to jump out the window of her Manhattan apartment.
Her distress was dismissed as "baby blues", partly because she feared admitting how deep into the abyss she had fallen (even to herself). The secrecy and stigma that surrounds postnatal depression meant that she was ignorant of the symptoms. And she was such a good actress that she could hide her panic and paranoia from all but her worried husband.
Shields was a model and actress practically from birth, "inextricably bound" to her mother, who controlled every aspect of her life. Growing up in Manhattan, Shields went to school every day like other children, but had to eat her lunch with the teachers because her classmates shunned her. She resisted the lure of a Hollywood career to get a degree in French literature from Princeton, then returned to acting with breezy roles in TV (Suddenly Susan) and on Broadway (Cabaret and Wonderful Town).
Her only disappointment, until her mid-30s, was her brief, failed marriage to Andre Agassi - but both partners soon went on to marry other people and start families. Shields married comedy writer Chris Henchy, only to learn that she could not conceive normally due to scarring on her cervix caused by the surgical removal of pre-cancerous cells years earlier.
But even her experience of IVF - apart from a traumatic miscarriage - eventually had a happy ending - except that Shields couldn't stop crying and thought she was losing her mind.
Postnatal depression (PND) affects an estimated 6,000 Irish women every year - as many as one mother in seven. It's more common in first pregnancies and differs from the hormonal, third-day baby blues in that PND can strike at any time during the first postnatal year, usually appearing, though, within the first two weeks. It's not as severe or obvious as postnatal psychosis, which requires hospitalisation, but the depression it provokes is overwhelming nevertheless.
For this reason, suicide is second only to heart complaints as a cause of death in new Irish mothers, causing 12 per cent of maternal deaths. Risk factors include lack of someone to confide in, lack of social supports, previous depression, exhaustion and radical changes in lifestyle. In Clondalkin, Co Dublin, where social deprivation is added to the many other pressures of new motherhood, one in four mothers suffers with PND.
Yet many sufferers hide their sad feelings because society unrealistically expects new mothers to be blissfully happy - especially when the baby was conceived after many years of hope and infertility treatment.
Shields felt disembodied, distant and disoriented. She couldn't reach her own heart and mind. "I felt a fraud," she writes. At first, she insisted on doing everything for the baby herself, with no help from anyone but her husband, despite the fact that she could have afforded a baby nurse. She kept her own mother at a safe distance, so confused was she about that complex relationship, which had never allowed Shields to take the risks involved in becoming an autonomous person, as opposed to a persona.
"There was a freedom in performing, and I felt I would never be able to experience it again. I became aware that, as a mother, your priorities get switched, and I felt surprisingly resentful. In my mind, being a mother meant not being able to be on stage. It was an irrational thought but, according to my current state of mind, having a baby commanded an all-or-nothing approach; I didn't believe in the possibility of balance."
With hindsight and therapy, Shields would eventually realise that she had denied vast emotional pain during her pregnancy (displayed to the world on the cover of Vogue). Her father had died three weeks before the birth, but Shields was unable to fly to see him during his last days and so closed off her feelings of grief, even pretending he was still alive. Two years before, her best friend had committed suicide. She had been through an exceptionally traumatic birth, following several exhausting rounds of IVF. Addiction and alcoholism were in her family history, making her fearful of weakness and of taking anti-depressants, while also instilling in her an unhealthy stoicism.
Shields eventually agreed to take anti-depressants, although without the concurrent therapy that was advised. She then appeared as the perfect new mother in Hello magazine, feeling a sense of validation for the first time since becoming a mother. A few months later, she brought her baby onto a film set and began working, putting too much pressure on herself, then cavalierly stopped taking her medicine. She suffered panic attacks and wanted to ram her car into a wall on the side of the LA freeway, not even thinking of how this would hurt her baby, who was strapped in the back seat.
Shields recovered when she finally surrendered to her depression, by admitting that she needed both the drugs and the therapy in order to regain her sanity. Like many high-achievers in the public eye, she wrote a book about her recovery exposing all her flaws.
Postnatal depression gave Shields the opportunity to take a belated inner journey that seems to have made her a deeper thinking, more well-rounded and independent woman who has finally grown up.
"For me, becoming a mom has brought to the surface a sensitivity the depth of which I never knew existed. It's hard to explain except to say that I feel more vulnerable and stripped of my personal defences than ever before, and yet in some ways, I feel stronger. For me, becoming a mother also means that I feel happier than I could imagine and more sad than I thought possible. None of this indicates that I am crazy or in any way abnormal," she writes. "Basically I am just more alive and present in my own life than I ever remember being."
If you think you may have PND, talk to your GP. PND support is available from Parentline (1890-927277), 10am-10pm, Monday to Thursday, 10am-4pm, Friday; and from Aware (1890-303302), 24 hours a day.