Hayden Panettiere says postpartum depression made her feel like her ‘soul was dead’

• Hayden Panettiere’s memoir details her struggle with postpartum depression and alcoholism.
• After rehab, Panettiere gave up custody of her daughter to focus on recovery and her well-being.
• PPD affects millions, with rising rates impacting mothers like Panettiere.

When Hayden Panettiere met her newborn daughter following a grueling labor and emergency surgery, she “felt nothing,” she wrote in her new memoir.

“I wasn’t OK,” Panettiere wrote in “This Is Me: A Reckoning,” which was released May 19. “I had to figure out how to bond with her. It felt like an insurmountable task, and I was only on the first day.”

The “Scream 4” actor, 36, added that she didn’t have what felt like postpartum anxiety, but a void of emotions altogether.

“It wasn’t panic that was sitting in my chest. It was nothing. A total blackout of emotion, like my soul was dead,” she wrote.

Panettiere turned to alcohol to address her postpartum depression

After acting since childhood, Panettiere figured that the best way to address her growing symptoms after giving birth in 2014 was to “manufacture happiness,” like she manufactured tears on set, and she thought the best way to get “those happy hormones” like dopamine, serotonin, and endorphins was to turn to alcohol.

Around four months after giving birth, Panettiere was drinking a bottle of wine per night, waking up, and immediately finishing a mini bottle of Fireball just to make it through the day. At the time, she was also shooting “Nashville,” in which she starred from 2012 to 2018.

“The first thing I’d thought of when I woke up was alcohol. Not my child, not my job, and not the rest of my life. I needed a drink to function — at 6 a.m.,” she wrote.

Between seasons three and four of the show, she entered treatment for the first time, where she was officially diagnosed with PPD.

Eventually, Panettiere signed over custody of her daughter and focused on healing

In 2018, when her daughter, Kaya, was 3 years old — and after Panettiere had another stay in rehab — Panettiere’s ex, and the father of her child, former professional boxer Wladimir Klitschko, asked for full custody. He told her he worried about Kaya when she was with Panettiere.

Although Panettiere wrote that she would “fight until I’m dead” for her daughter, she eventually allowed Kaya to move to her father’s native Ukraine with him.

She could afford a two-country custody battle, but wrote “it would destroy me psychologically at a time when my heart and soul were weaker than they’d ever been” at the beginning of recovery.

She also believed letting her daughter grow up out of the spotlight would let Kaya “feel at rest, not just physically, but mentally and emotionally.”

“Not being under the same roof with her every day has been the most gut-wrenching experience of my life,” Panettiere wrote. “Although I miss Kaya so much my heart aches, I know how blessed I am to be her mom. She is the greatest gift of my life.”

PPD is on the rise, but it frequently goes undiagnosed

A 2024 analysis found that diagnosis rates of PPD have “increased significantly across all racial and ethnic groups and BMI categories over the past decade.”

One of the most insidious parts of PPD, which the NIH defines as “a mood disorder” characterized by “extreme sadness, anxiety, and fatigue that may make it difficult to carry out daily tasks,” is that it makes mothers feel alone. Panettiere called herself “lonely and depressed,” and “miserable.”

Pregnant and postpartum women with perinatal depression experience extreme sadness, anxiety, and fatigue that may make it difficult to carry out daily tasks, including caring for themselves or others.

CDC research reported that one in eight mothers reported experiencing PPD symptoms after birth, though it will never be known how many mothers are experiencing it but are undiagnosed, or think they’re just having the “baby blues.”