The recent death of Hayden Panettiere, the child actress turned television and movie star, has drawn fresh attention to her partnership with the skin care brand Neutrogena, which she worked with for about a decade.
The actress wrote in her memoir, and said in a podcast interview with Jay Shetty just a few months before she died, that the brand let her contract expire after she publicly admitted to struggling with postpartum depression in 2015 — a move that she said shocked her. Panettiere also said she turned to alcohol and opioids to self-medicate during this period.
Panettiere’s claim on the podcast that Neutrogena dropped her at a vulnerable moment, a clip of which was shared widely on social media, started a broad conversation about the stigma still attached to a mental health issue that affects an estimated 10 to 15 percent of women who give birth in the United States. Social media users called for a boycott of the brand, which created pressure for the brand to respond.
Neutrogena posted a statement on social media on Thursday. “We are proud to have partnered with her and understand that we made her feel unsupported,” the statement read. “This is not what Neutrogena stands for or who we want to be.” (Neutrogena did not respond to a request for an interview.)
The conversation might have struck a nerve, said Michelle Battersby, president of Peanut, a social media app for mothers, because many mothers can relate to the experience of struggling emotionally in the months and years after giving birth.
Based on what Panettiere has shared in interviews and her memoir, she “had asked for help over and over and over, and she was failed over and over and over,” Battersby said, adding: “Can we be surprised when women then don’t speak about their postpartum suffering or their mental health?”
In her memoir and in the podcast interview, Panettiere shared the details of her experience after giving birth to her daughter, Kaya.
“I had my daughter and I knew something was just terribly, terribly wrong,” Panettiere said. “I wasn’t connecting with her the way that I knew I should be.”
Panettiere went into treatment for depression in 2015 when Kaya was 4 months old. “I left clean and sober,” she writes in her memoir, “but there seemed to be no solution to my postpartum depression.”
At the time, she was filming the ABC and CMT drama “Nashville,” in which her character, Juliette Barnes, also became pregnant and dealt with postpartum depression and substance abuse. Panettiere told Shetty that reliving these experiences onscreen was traumatizing and disorienting.
She entered treatment again in 2016, parted ways with Neutrogena and in 2018 lost custody of her daughter, who now lives with her father.
“The problem wasn’t about what is or isn’t wrong in my life,” Panettiere wrote in her memoir. “The issue was that I had everything I’d ever wanted — a great job, a baby, friends, a fiancé — and yet I was still unhappy. I had postpartum depression, and it sucked. I wanted more than anything to get back to that place of happiness.”
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