Brooke Shields feared she would kill herself by driving into a wall after being stricken with severe post-natal depression.
The “Blue Lagoon” star, 57, is now happily settled with TV writer Chris Henchy, 59, with whom she has two daughters, Rowan, 19, and Grier, 16, but said she was so distraught and depressed after having her eldest child, the girl felt like a “stranger”.
She told the “WTF with Marc Maron” podcast: “I was exhausted. I had gone through IVF seven times.
“I lost so much blood when I gave birth to her and herniated my uterus. It was just everything that could have gone wrong. I thought I was going to die. They were going to give me a hysterectomy.
“There was so much trauma. And then I get home and I don’t know what to do with a baby.
“I’m depleted and I’m completely biochemically imbalanced, and no one knows it, and they just say, ‘Stop breastfeeding or stop doing this’.
“I couldn’t understand my mind. It’s the worst. It’s taking everything that made me who I am and absolutely ripping my legs out from under me.
“You just feel so helpless and scared. I called the doctor and it was like, ‘Oh, it’s the baby blues’.”
She shared an astonishing follow-up conversation with her doctor in which he apologised for discussing her case with his wife: “The doctor called me back and he said, ‘I apologise for violating the patient-doctor privilege. I talked to my wife, who is a doula (offering emotional support through pregnancy and after birth), about it, and she thinks that you are experiencing post-partum (post-natal) depression and would you take medication?’ ”
Shields said she refused the offer, “of course”, but admitted she relented after “everybody said, ‘Please, please, please’.”
She added: “I finally said okay to get everybody off my back. I started feeling better and wanting to be around her.”
But she said the suicidal thoughts kicked in when she came off her medication, leading her to fear she would “drive (her) car into a wall on” California’s 405 freeway during her “very bad” post-natal depression.
“I started just feeling more myself so I went off (medication) … because clearly I was a doctor by that point.
“I thought I was going to drive my car into the wall on the 405,” she recalled. “You see it (happening) … it has pictures. They rush, if you close your eyes, into your brain.”
Shields said she called her doctor when she started to have the thoughts. The doctor stayed on the phone with her until she arrived home, before telling her: “You’re going back on the medicine immediately.”