Counting On alum Joy-Anna Duggar is reflecting on her grief journey following the stillbirth of her daughter Annabell.
“That was extremely hard,” Joy-Anna, 28, recalled on the Wednesday, September 2, episode of her sister Jinger Duggar’s eponymous podcast. “I felt like, at first, I was like, ‘I’m going to be strong and I’m going to push through this.’ But after the dust settled and, like, a new normal had to start happening, it was really hard.”
Joy-Anna revealed in 2019 that she lost Annabell at 20 weeks. The former reality star also shares sons Gideon, 8, and Gunner, 3, with husband Austin Forsyth, as well as daughter Evelyn, 6. (Joy-Anna announced on Tuesday, September 1, that she is currently pregnant.)
According to Joy-Anna, navigating the pregnancy loss was “the first time” that she “went through a bout of depression.”
“I really had to work through a lot of hard things and … I guess in a lot of ways, I didn’t know how to handle it,” she acknowledged. “I was like, ‘I don’t want to turn into this bitter person that just can’t move on from the past, like, I want to be able to work through this.’”
At the same time, Joy-Anna felt it was “so hard and so heavy” to move on from the loss and her depressive thoughts.
“It felt like I would never see light at the end of the tunnel. It was a really dark time,” she said. “I feel like, finally, by maybe six months it started to lift a little bit, and I was feeling a little bit more like, ‘OK, we’re going to get through this [and] we’re going to be OK.’”
Joy-Anna has since been able to find “a little bit of happiness” through her children.
“True joy comes from the Lord, and I think my kids help me have a little bit of happiness here and there in the dark moments,” she said. “It is really hard to find joy in those hard moments.”
The former TLC personality further revealed on Wednesday that she faced “really bad” postpartum depression that “lasted a really long time” after welcoming Gunner in 2023.
“That was probably one of the darkest periods of my life,” she admitted to her sister. “I felt like it was just, like, the perfect storm of everything hitting all at once with postpartum, my hormones were crazy [and] there was just a lot of family stuff going on. Then I was also, finally, at a point where I was like, ‘I need to face these hard questions that I’ve had in the back of my mind for years.’”
Joy-Anna faced a so-called “spiritual crossroads,” questioning her relationship with God.
“It just felt so heavy and dark for so long, but it was something I had to walk through [it],” she stated. “I had to study and I had to get these answers to be able to move forward.”
Call or text the National Maternal Mental Health Hotline at 833-852-6262 for free, confidential support, available 24/7 in the U.S.
