Full House Star Andrea Barber Reveals Battle With Postpartum Depression

Let’s talk about it. While experiencing postpartum depression is still considered somewhat taboo, the reality is that one in seven women experience clinical PPD within their first year after giving birth, according to a study from JAMA Psychiatry. Closer to 70-80% of new moms in the U.S. get, at the least, “baby blues.” Still, some people are afraid to talk about it.

But Andrea Barber, who got famous during Full House‘s original run playing Kimmy Gibbler and returned for a leading role on Fuller House, revealed in her new book that she experienced postpartum depression after giving birth to her second child, a daughter named Felicity. She detailed the experience in her new book Full Circle: From Hollywood to Real Life and Back Again (out today), writing, “I am here to talk about my anxiety and depression.”

She told >USA Today, “It was several months of this long slow spiral of my vomiting every morning at 3 a.m. getting worse and worse and taking longer and longer to get out of bed … It was when I made that 5 AM phone call to my dad and said, ‘I need you to come pick me up. I don’t know how I am going to get through the next minute of this day, much less the whole day.'” Her then-husband, Jeremy Rytky didn’t know how to help her. Though her parents weren’t mental health professionals, she soon began trying them out to find one that could help her.

According to the actress, her co-stars Candace Cameron Bure and Jodie Sweentin were super supportive and even somewhat devastated when they learned the extent to which she was struggling with her mental health. “[Candace] told me, ‘I didn’t know it had gotten that bad.’ Like, her heart was hurting. I wasn’t really talking about it with anybody. Nobody really knew,” Andrea said.

She continued, “[Sharing my story] creates this culture of openness and this tribe of people with this shared experience and shared pain that we’re all in this together and we can heal.”

The Full House star isn’t the first actress to deal with postpartum. In fact, Chrissy Teigen, Sarah Michelle Gellar, and Courteney Cox all revealed they had a similar experience after giving birth. It’s the honesty and openness of these stars that can help us destigmatize postpartum depression in our every day lives, too.