The American mother of octuplets came out of hiding today to give her first public interview. Nadya Suleman (33), a single mother who already had six children, agreed to a TV appearance, brief details of which have been released.
The full tape will broadcast next week.
She told NBC what her mother and others have said since the octuplets were born: that she always wanted a huge family to make up for the isolation she felt as an only child.
“That was always a dream of mine, to have a large family, a huge family,” she said. “I just longed for certain connections and attachments with another person that ... I really lacked, I believe, growing up.”
In the interview Ms Suleman calls her childhood “pretty dysfunctional.”
Meanwhile public documents released to the Associated Press news agency yesterday showed she struggled with depression for years until she finally began to realise her childhood dream of having a huge family.
Ms Suleman told doctors she battled with depression for years after she was injured in a riot in 1999 at the state mental hospital where she worked. The doctors’ reports were included in more than 300 pages of documents released by California’s Department of Mental Health.
They reveal that Ms Suleman collected more than $165,000 in disability payments between 2002 and 2008 for an injury she said left her in near-constant pain and helped end her marriage.
In the state report, however, doctors indicate she had a happy childhood. She told them she was an above-average school student, enjoyed being a cheerleader, had many friends and stayed out of trouble. She said her parents were loving and supportive. As an adult, however, she said she often battled depression as she struggled to get pregnant and particularly after her injury.
The report says she had three miscarriages and two ectopic pregnancies. She told NBC she struggled for seven years before finally giving birth to her first child in 2001 through in vitro fertilisation.
She told a doctor who conducted a psychological evaluation for a workers’ compensation claim that the first birth was “the most wonderful, best thing that’s ever happened in my life.”
Ms Suleman said all her children have been born through in vitro fertilisation, with sperm donated from a friend. The first six range in age from two to seven.
The octuplets are doing fine, said doctors at Kaiser Permanente’s Bellflower Medical Centre where they were born on January 26th. The octuplets were born nine weeks prematurely and will be released from the hospital individually as they reach a near-normal newborn weight.
According to the state documents Ms Suleman was injured in 1999, when a riot involving nearly two dozen patients broke out in the women’s ward of the Metropolitan State Hospital in Norwalk, where she worked.
As she was helping other staff members restrain a patient, a desk thrown at her by another patient hit her in the back. It caused damage to her spine and left her complaining of headaches and intense pain throughout her lower body for years.
She attributed it in part to the break-up of her marriage to Marcos Gutierrez, whom she married in 1996. She told a psychiatrist the bouts of depression she was suffering as a result of her injury were unfair to her husband.
“I don’t want to keep bringing him down. I want him to move on with his life,” she told a psychiatrist. The couple split in 2000 and divorced last year.
Ms Suleman has come under criticism from TV and radio commentators, who accused her of irresponsibly having more children than she appears prepared to care for. Some say she had the octuplets to cash in with a TV or book deal.
The two publicists she hired last week have acknowledged she is reviewing such offers.
AP