Adele Reveals She Suffered From Postpartum Depression: 'I Felt Like I’d Made The Worst Decision Of My Life'

After Adele gave birth to a baby boy in 2012, jokes about postpartum depression flooded the internet. 

"Adele is so excited she gave birth to her new son so she can fall into a postpartum depression and write a new album," one person wrote on Twitter. The singer's prior albums were famously inspired by heartbreak.

"If Adele gets postpartum depression her next album is going to be off the chaaiinnnn," someone else tweeted.

But in her December 2016 cover story for Vanity Fair, Adele confirmed their punchlines were her reality: She *did* suffer from postpartum depression, and for a while she was struggling with motherhood.

"It frightened me," she said. "I felt very inadequate; I felt like I’d made the worst decision of my life."

She never took antidepressants for her illness, but was finally able to heal after opening up about it and connecting with mothers who felt the same. According to the American Psychological Association, one out of every seven mothers experiences serious depression that's worse than the usual "baby blues."

 "One day I said to a friend, 'I fuckin’ hate this,' and she just burst into tears and said, 'I fuckin’ hate this, too.' And it was done. It lifted."

Though she's "obsessed" with her son, she doesn't think she'll have another child and is still working on figuring out what it means to have her own life while helping her son start his own.

"Eventually I just said, I’m going to give myself an afternoon a week, just to do whatever the fuck I want without my baby," she confessed. "A friend of mine said, ‘Really? Don’t you feel bad?’ I said, I do, but not as bad as I’d feel if I didn’t do it."

Though she hasn't quite figured out how to balance motherhood and her career quite yet, she doesn't mind "because of the love I feel for (my son)."