Actress Brooke Shields is pregnant again

Oct 28, 2005, 6:41 GMT

Los Angeles - Actress Brooke Shields, 40, who suffered severe postpartum depression after the birth of her first baby and was criticized by Tom Cruise for taking psychotropic medicines, is pregnant again.

The U.S. broadcast, Entertainment Tonight, reported on its website that the baby was expected in the new year. Shields, married since 2001 to film writer Chris Henchy, gave birth to her first child, daughter Rowan Francis, in early 2003.

In May, Shields announced that she had suffered severe depression after the birth, after going to great lengths to get pregnant in the first place. In her book, 'And Down Came the Rain', she vividly describes the panic and sadness that followed what she had anticipated to be the happiest event of her life.

She got into a bitter word battle with Cruise over the medications she took. Cruise, a follower of Scientology, disputed that chemical brain imbalances cause depression and chided her publicly in a nationally broadcast interview for taking the medicine.

He said Shields should have rather taken vitamins and exercised a lot.

Brooke responded with an essay in The New York Times in July, charging that Cruise had shown an 'utter lack of understanding about postpartum depression and childbirth in general'.

Cruise's remarks also drew fire from two major U.S. groups focussed on mental illness - the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI) and the American Psychiatric Association (APA) - which charged that Cruise was off base, 'irresponsible' and deterring 'people with mental illnesses from getting the care they need'.

'Medications can be an important and even life-saving part of a comprehensive and individualized treatment plan,' they said in a joint statement.

Before marrying Henchy, Shields was married for two years to tennis star Andre Agassi. The couple divorced in 1999.