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Lisa Rinna warned her husband that she was having violent postpartum visions of violence.
This was years ago, after the celebrity couple welcomed daughter Amelia.
Though Lisa is quick to emphasize that their baby was never in danger, her postpartum depression was a torment.
Fortunately, she found a medical solution that worked for her — and quickly.
Lisa Rinna warned Harry Hamlin ‘I’m gonna kill you’ in 2001
On a recent episode of their Let’s Not Talk About The Husband podcast, Lisa Rinna and Harry Hamlin opened up about postpartum depression.
In 2001, the RHOBH alum gave birth to their second daughter, Amelia Gray Hamlin.
“I’ll never forget after Amelia was born, we were at the cabin in Canada,” Harry recalled. “We went to a movie one day in Bracebridge, and you said, ‘I’m gonna kill you.’”
“And I said, ‘You better call Howie [her OB-GYN] right now,’” Harry continued.
He then detailed: “We were sitting outside the theater.”
When Lisa admitted that she didn’t recall that exact exchange, her husband specified.
“You said, ‘You better watch out. I feel like killing you,’” he told her. “You said, ‘Keep the knives in a drawer.’”
She ‘was having horrible hallucinations of killing people’
“I was having these horrible visions. It’s true,” Lisa Rinna described. “I was having horrible hallucinations of killing people.”
She elaborated: “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.”
Lisa did clarify something extremely important:
“I did not have horrible visions about hurting the baby in any way, shape or form. It wasn’t about that.”
So what were her postpartum symptoms all about?
Lisa explained: 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.”
Postpartum depression is complex, and not the same for every sufferer.
Sometimes, natural caretaking instincts — thinking of potential dangers to the baby — turn into obsessions that feel indistinguishable from desiring to harm the baby. It is good that Lisa did not experience this.
Antidepressants ‘changed the game instantly’
Fortunately, the doctor prescribed antidepressants which “worked instantly” for Lisa Rinna.
She shared that they “changed the whole thing. It changed the game instantly.”
Of course, “instantly” took about three weeks. Most antidepressants take weeks to take full effect in a person’s system, and to wear off.
“Here we are on an island with a baby and a 3-year-old. I was out of my mind,” Lisa described of the “f–king nightmare challenge” of waiting for the medication to take effect.
The first time, after Delilah’s birth in 1998, was harder. She didn’t have postpartum visions, but still felt the “hopelessness” without knowing why.
“I had postpartum 15 months and didn’t do anything about it,” she recalled. “Didn’t know I had it, didn’t know what to do.”
Some mental illnesses are part of someone’s reality for life. Others are environmental.
But a lot of chemical depression, like Lisa’s postpartum experiences, has medication that can treat the symptoms and even function as a cure. Psychiatry has saved more lives than we’ll ever be able to accurately count.
