Britney Spears Reflects on Postpartum Depression in New Memoir

Britney Spears has been in the limelight, publicly scrutinized and speculated about for years. But now, for the first time, the legendary pop singer is getting to tell her own story. In her new memoir The Woman In Me Spears opens up about everything from her relationship with Justin Timberlake to life as a mother.

In a recently released excerpt from the book, Spears dives into the struggles that came with having her two boys back to back in 2005 and 2006, not the least among them being postpartum depression.

“Unfortunately, there wasn’t the same conversation about mental health back then that there is now,” Spears wrote. “I hope any new mothers reading this who are having a hard time will get help early. … Because I now know that I was displaying just about every symptom of perinatal depression: sadness, anxiety, fatigue.”

“I got a little depressed once I was no longer keeping them safe inside my body. They seemed so vulnerable out in the world of jockeying paparazzi and tabloids,” she writes. “I began to suspect that I was a bit overprotective when I wouldn’t let my mom hold Jayden for the first two months.”

Spears explains that paparazzi coverage of her life exacerbated her struggle with postpartum depression, and it would all come to a head in February of 2007 during her infamous head-shaving experience. In another excerpt, the …Baby One More Time looked back at the experience, admitting that she was in “the throes of severe postpartum depression” and dealing with “abandonment by my husband, the torture of being separated from my two babies, the death of my adored aunt Sandra, and the constant drumbeat of pressure from paparazzi.”

While Spears saw her 2007 head shaving and acting out as her way to push back against the paparazzi and those with constant commentary on her body, unfortunately, it turned about to be one of the contributing factors that landed Spears in a conservatorship under her father which she says she agreed to for her kids. “Because I played by the rules,” Spears writes in her memoir, “I was reunited with my boys.”

Now out from under her conservatorship, Spears has agreed to have both of her sons live with their father, Kevin Federline, in Hawaii in hopes it will help them get away from media attention in Los Angeles.

Britney Spears’ memoir The Woman in Me is now availble for purchase at Amazon.com.