On Friday’s episode of Lisa Rinna and Harry Hamlin’s “Let’s Not Talk About the Husband” podcast, the couple recalled Rinna’s intense struggles with postpartum depression after she gave birth to their second daughter, Amelia, in 2001.
“I’ll never forget after Amelia was born, we were at the cabin in Canada, we went to a movie one day in Bracebridge, and you said, ‘I’m gonna kill you,’” Hamlin, 73, recalled.
“And I said, ‘You better call Howie [her OB-GYN] right now,’” the “Mad Men” actor continued. “We were sitting outside the theater.”
“Are you sure I said that?” the “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” alum asked.
“You said, ‘You better watch out. I feel like killing you,’” Hamlin reminded his wife. “You said, ‘Keep the knives in a drawer.’”
Rinna then confessed, “I was having these horrible visions. It’s true. I was having horrible hallucinations of killing people. And I needed to take the knives out of the house. And I also had horrible visions of driving the car into a brick wall.
“I did not have horrible visions about hurting the baby in any way, shape or form,” she clarified. “It wasn’t about that. It was about hopelessness, darkest depression and these horrible visions, hallucinations. It was the knives and it was driving the car into the brick wall.”
Rinna recalled that she was prescribed antidepressants that “worked instantly” and “changed the whole thing. It changed the game instantly.”
But she noted that the medication didn’t kick in for about three weeks, so she still dealt with “a f–king nightmare challenge” caring for her two kids in Canada.
“Here we are on an island with a baby and a 3-year-old. I was out of my mind,” Rinna shared, adding that she also dealt with postpartum depression after older daughter Delilah’s birth in 1998.
“I had postpartum 15 months and didn’t do anything about it,” she said. “Didn’t know I had it, didn’t know what to do.”
The “Melrose Place” actress told her husband that she didn’t have visions during her first postpartum experience, but she still felt “hopelessness.”
Rinna, who has been married to Hamlin since 1997, opened up about suffering from postpartum depression in an interview with Cosmopolitan last year.
“I didn’t know I had it for the first 15 months of Delilah’s life, and then once we figured it out, I was treated for it, and I was ready for it when I had Amelia,” she said.
“I went on an antidepressant, which helped tremendously. Without that, I don’t know how long it would’ve taken,” Rinna continued.
“I’m very positive and a very happy person, and I felt completely hopeless,” she added. “And that’s pretty scary when you’ve never had that happen in your life.”
