We’ve always thought Adele was the kind of friend you would want around during the hard times.
And this was confirmed when the singer helped to diagnose her close pal Laura Dockrill’s ‘hellish’ battle with postpartum psychosis.
Adele and the author have been close friends since they met at the Brit School and the singer is godmother to Laura’s son.
In the months after she gave birth, Laura began to struggle with scary changes in her thoughts and behaviour.
And following Adele’s own battle with post-natal depression, the Hello hitmaker was quick to realise something serious was going on during a phone call with her pal.
‘I Facetimed Adele and said to her, “I’m really bad, it’s got very very bad”, and I’m kind of explaining this to her on the phone, and she Googled what I had, and she was like, “She looks to me like she’s psychotic”, Laura explained to BBC Sounds podcast, Duvet Days.
‘It was in my eyes – you can physically see when someone is psychotic, you can tell.’
And Adele was quick to use her initiative to follow up on her hunch. Laura continued: ‘She said to [my husband] Hugo “I think she’s psychotic,” and she Googled it, psychotic and pregnancy and suddenly it comes up on an NHS page with all of my symptoms, every single one of them, and this is a medical emergency, call 999.
‘And she thought Hugo was gonna go, “Are you crazy? She hasn’t got this”, and he was like, “Yes. That is 100% what she has.”‘
The experience was tough for Laura and she explained how she reacted while being taken to get help.
‘They drive me though central London, I’m hysterical on the way there on the phone to Adele just going “I’m a fraud, I’m an actor, I’m not who you think I am, I’m a liar” – all these things,’ she recalled. ‘We go to the hospital; I have no idea where I am. I have no concept of what my situation is.’
She continued: ‘And then when I had this assessment in the middle of the night at the hospital is when I told them that my brain wanted me to stab myself and how scared I was of that.’
Adele previously revealed how she wasn’t aware of the post-natal depression she was experiencing as a new mother.
She shared: ‘My knowledge of postpartum – or post-natal, as we call it in England – is that you don’t want to be with your child; you’re worried you might hurt your child; you’re worried you weren’t doing a good job. But I was obsessed with my child. I felt very inadequate; I felt like I’d made the worst decision of my life … It can come in many different forms.’
The Someone Like You singer is mum to six-year-old Angelo with her ex Simon Konecki.
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