Lake Bell fell into depression following her son’s traumatic home birth.
The 40-year-old actress recently revealed how her and husband Scott Campbell’s kids, Nova, now five, and Osgood, two, were born with the umbilical cord wrapped around their necks and unable to breathe and she admitted her youngest child’s subsequent admission to a hospital intensive care unit made her stop feeling like herself.
She said: "I was like I need something, I can’t be a person. I don’t know how to be … I had never felt that before.
"My heart aches for those who feel that through the hardship of their life every day, like, I have felt it. I know what it is and it’s a monster. It’s a demon."
Lake realised how low she had got one evening when her young daughter could feel she wasn’t a "normal mommy" anymore.
She recalled: "I remember my daughter saying at one point… ‘Go away, monster, you go away!’ and I was like, ‘What? Are you okay? Is there a monster here?’ and she said, ‘He’s still here. Go away monster. You can’t play here!’
"I know what she’s talking about. She feels like I’m not ‘normal mommy.’ She feels like there’s a f***ing demon in the goddamn room and she wants it to get the f**k away. It was a feeling of a little person being very intuitive to there being a cloud of darkness here and she was trying to get it away."
The ‘Bless This Mess’ actress "begged" to be put on medication to help her recover and she found it really helped.
Speaking on ‘The Conversation with Amanda De Cadenet’, she said: "I took a medication called Zoloft, a very low dose and this was again, a person who was afraid of Advil, and I begged for it and I begged for it for my own well-being and for my family’s well-being … and it took me to a place where I could be. I could just be.
"It was rational. I needed to just be Lake and I felt finally like I could breathe the air that Lake breathes, not like some other person that I don’t recognise."
Lake admitted she has always been into an "organic f***ing kumbaya way of living" but wanted to share her story to destigmatise the use of medication and getting help from therapists.
She said: "I think parents, we really are in it together."
Lake Bell slipped into depression after son’s birth
