‘For so long, it’s been really not talked about’
Chrissy Teigen, AHN to spread word on postpartum depression
When Heather Peterson was told that she was about to have a conversation with Chrissy Teigen, she started laughing.
“I thought it was a joke to get me to lighten up,” Ms. Peterson said. “I didn’t believe her.”
Yet, a few minutes later, there was Ms. Teigen, seated on a green couch at West Penn Hospital in Bloomfield. And for the next 40 minutes, the two women — one a former elementary school teacher from Slippery Rock and one a supermodel from Los Angeles — shared their struggles with postpartum mental health.
“You’re like, a mom idol to all of us,” said Ms. Peterson, who had been watching Ms. Teigen’s husband, singer John Legend, on “The Voice” that morning.
When Ms. Teigen revealed her struggle with postpartum
depression in Glamour magazine in 2017, Ms. Peterson remembered reading it online.
In December, Allegheny Health Network opened the Alexis Joy D’Achille Center for Perinatal Mental Health, which not only treats patients but also seeks to raise awareness of postpartum mental health as part of its mission. To do so, AHN enlisted Ms. Teigen, a model and cookbook author who has 24 million Instagram followers and millions more on other social media platforms.
Ms. Teigen went on NBC’s “Today,” identified as a paid spokeswoman for AHN, and shared her story of postpartum depression.
“I wish I’d had an AHN center where I was,” she said on the show. “It blows your mind that this center isn’t everywhere.”
She promoted a hashtag for people to post photos and talk about postpartum depression, #mywishformoms, that has since been shared, commented on or tagged more than 1.5 million times. When views to Ms. Teigen’s Instagram stories about postpartum depression are counted, that number rises to more than 15 million.
AHN has received traffic to its website from 106 countries and calls from as far away as Texas and California from people inquiring about treatment. On May 8, about a week after the campaign launched, searches to Google for postpartum depression were higher than they’ve been in the past year.
Even organizations unaffiliated with Pittsburgh, such as Postpartum Support International, have seen an increased volume of people looking for help with postpartum depression.
“It’s been incredible,” said Ms. Teigen in a phone interview from her home in Los Angeles, pausing at times to coo at her son, Miles, who had his first birthday on Thursday. “It’s amazing how once you open up, how many people are just so excited to share their journey and their stories. For so long, it’s been really not talked about.”
Postpartum mental illness is the most common complication of pregnancy, with an estimated 1 in 7 women affected by it. Symptoms can include withdrawal from loved ones, feeling distant from the baby and prolonged sadness, beyond just a brief period of “baby blues.”
In 2013, Steven D’Achille, of McCandless, became convinced that his wife, Alexis, was suffering from mental illness after the birth of their daughter, Adriana. Despite taking her to seven facilities in 13 days, she wasn’t able to get the help she needed and committed suicide when their daughter was 6 weeks old.
He began raising money shortly afterward and ultimately helped start the Alexis Joy D’Achille Center for Perinatal Mental Health. A Facebook post from Mr. D’Achille this month, showing the last photo ever taken of his wife and daughter and using the #mywishformoms tag, was shared more than 100,000 times.
The center at AHN has grown quickly, thanks to better screening and increased awareness. When psychiatrist Sarah Homitsky joined West Penn in 2016, the facility saw four patients a week for postpartum depression, she said. Now, the facility is averaging 150 per week — some through its intensive group therapy outpatient program and some through individual appointments.
One of the first patients after the center opened in December was Ms. Peterson.
Though she never had depression or any other mental health issue before getting pregnant, she struggled with postpartum depression after the birth of her first daughter, Julia, who recently turned 5. When her second daughter, Jenna, was born three years later, she didn’t have depression — but developed postpartum anxiety instead, which caused severe insomnia.
She would stay up all night hyperventilating. For months, worry about a situation that now seems simple — what if her older daughter needed to go to the bathroom while the baby was eating? — would leave her sleepless and panicked.
“I had gone to see my wonderful [primary care physician], but it came to a point where we both said, ‘We’ve tried everything,’” she said. “I was on every sleep medication they could give me.”
The PCP referred her to AHN, which had held the ribbon cutting for their new center that day. They were still moving in boxes, but once Ms. Peterson described her symptoms on the phone to psychologist Rebecca Weinberg, she told Ms. Peterson that she could be seen in an hour.
“I couldn’t even drive myself because I hadn’t slept,” Ms. Peterson said. “I spent an hour talking [to Ms. Weinberg], bawling my eyes out. She brought in Dr. Homitsky and they came up with a plan.”
Dr. Homitsky changed her medication and convinced her that she needed therapy, even though she had previously refused.
“I slept 10 hours that night, thanks to her,” said Ms. Peterson, who continues to receive therapy through their telemedicine program. “I could not have been more wrong.”
It was stories like that one that Ms. Teigen heard at AHN, when she spent time in March talking to Ms. Peterson and two other AHN patients.
“I’ve never really sat down on a couch and had a really candid, open conversation,” Ms. Teigen said during a phone interview. “We were having a nice conversation where there was no rush and no judgment. It was nice to hear everyone’s stories and know that there were more out there.”
Ms. Teigen shared her struggles as well — telling Ms. Peterson, for example, that she started keeping clothes in a pantry downstairs, because going upstairs to get dressed seemed like an insurmountable effort.
For Ms. Peterson, it is helpful now to try to make other people more informed than she was. All she remembers hearing about postpartum depression prior to having Julia was a brief presentation in her prenatal class, which she largely ignored.
“In my mind, I didn’t think it would happen to me — there was no history of mental illness in my family,” she said. “Looking back, I wish I had paid more attention and I wish we would have spent more than 10 minutes on it. This is the No. 1 complication of pregnancy, and if that’s the case, we need to be doing more than what we’re doing. The conversation needs to be had and turned up to the max volume.”