The postpartum experience is different for everyone: some don’t have many emotional fallouts to deal with, while others have debilitating postpartum depression. You never know which is going to happen, and for Lisa Rinna, she had no idea she was going to have terrifying hallucinations.
During an appearance on the April 18, 2025, episode of her Let’s Not Talk About the Husband podcast with her longtime husband Harry Hamlin, she talked about her postpartum experiences.
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She and Hamlin welcomed two daughters named Delilah Belle, born in June 1998, and Amelia Gray, born in June 2001; and her postpartum experiences were so different.
Hamlin recalled Rinna saying “‘I’m gonna kill you,’” after welcoming Amelia in 2001. “And I said, ‘You better call [your OB-GYN] right now.’ You said, ‘You better watch out. I feel like killing you.’ You said, ‘Keep the knives in the drawer.’”
While Rinna didn’t recall this interaction, she does remember hallucinating.
“I was having horrible hallucinations of killing people 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,” she said. “I did not have horrible visions about hurting the baby in any way, shape or form. It wasn’t about that. It was about hopelessness, darkest depression and these horrible visions, hallucinations. And it was the knives and it was driving the car into a brick wall.”
Harry Hamlin, Lisa Rinna, Amelia Gray Hamlin, Delilah Belle Hamlin
Now, hallucinations after postpartum are very rare, and are often associated with postpartum psychosis. Now, we’re not diagnosing Rinna by any means! We just know that hallucinations are very rare. According to the Cleveland Clinic, hallucinations happen 1-2 times in 1,000 deliveries.
As for the intrusive thoughts about harming someone, that can occur in either postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis.
“I had horrible postpartum depression, but I didn’t know it. I didn’t know what it was. When you have your first baby, you don’t know. You just don’t know,” she said, noting how anti-depressants “worked instantly, changed the whole thing. It changed the game instantly.”
And she also talked about welcoming Delilah, and the postpartum experiences afterward. She said, “[The first time] I was just hopeless. That’s the word. I was just absolutely hopeless. Like a huge dark cloud all over me. I don’t know how to describe it, because mine didn’t manifest itself toward the baby at all — it was toward me. I would say, looking back, I was completely psychotic.”
There’s so much that can happen in postpartum. Along with postpartum depression, there’s postpartum psychosis, postpartum rage, and more; all of which should be spoken about with a trusted medical professional.
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