Jess Eva discusses postnatal depression on I’m A Celebrity … Get Me Out Of Here!

Former The Block winner and radio star Jess Eva opened up about battling postnatal depression in a candid campsite chat not aired on the show.

Effervescent radio star and current I’m A Celeb campmate Jess Eva has revealed she battled postnatal depression in unseen footage from the Channel 10 reality show.

The mother-of-two spoke candidly with co-stars Abbie Chatfield and Toni Pearen in the unaired clip, describing the time in her life as “awful” and sharing that she “didn’t change a nappy for 12 months” after the birth of her son Freddy.

She later said she hopes to break the stigma surrounding postnatal depression.

RELATED: Surprise exit as star quits I’m A Celeb

Jess Eva discussed the “awful” time in her life in unseen footage from the show. Picture: Channel 10.

Eva and her partner Norm Hogan, who both rose to fame after starring on The Block on 2018, have two children: Fred, 6, and Matilda, who turned 4 while Eva was filming I’m A Celeb.

While chatting about motherhood with her campmates, Chatfield asked the Triple M radio personality: “Are you on pure poo duty or does Norm do poo as well?”

“Norm’s very good … I had postnatal for the first 12 months, so I didn’t change a nappy for my first 12 months,” she responded, adding: “It was awful, but I got out of it. Some people never get out of it.”

RELATED: Abbie hits back at star’s bikini comment

Jess Eva got candid with her campmates Abbie Chatfield and Toni Pearen. Picture: Channel 10.

In a to-camera interview elsewhere, she elaborated: “I think it’s easy to talk about now because I’m over it, and then there’s such a stigma that people can’t talk about it. I know that I was in a spot where I left Freddy in his cot by himself and I rang Norm and said ‘I’m out of here’. That’s how quick it can happen.

“I’m full of beans … but I wasn’t then,” she recalled.

Speaking of her recovery, she revealed she took anti depressants and saw a counsellor who taught her to “dismiss her negative thoughts” over a span of seven days in an effort to “change her neurological pattern”, a treatment which worked for her.

“You’ve gotta talk about it, it’s not the elephant in the room, it is the room,” she later said.

“If you’ve got a room full of women that have had kids, chances are probably 80 per cent have experienced postnatal depression but are too embarrassed to talk about it because they think it’s some kind of failure on their parenthood and that’s not the case.”

“It’s not the elephant in the room,” Eva said.

Elsewhere in her chat with Chatfield and Pearen, Eva shared a hilarious experience from changing her now six-year-old son’s nappy when he was a toddler.

“My Fred’s biggest tantrum was he did a poo in his nappy when he was like two or three or something, and he started screaming at me because he wanted me to put it back in his bum.

“I’ve got a video, he was like ‘I want my poo back’,” she said mimicking her son crying as the stars buckled over in fits of laughter.

She went on to share another embarrassing tale from her son’s nappy days, revealing she once discovered fragments of blue tinsel that had disappeared from the bottom of the Christmas tree, mistakenly blamed on the dog.

“I was like ‘Norm, Norm, I found the tinsel’,” she joked.

Eva and Hogan became fan favourites on The Block in 2018, pocketing $209,000 on the show.

Eva is currently the co-host of Triple M Sydney breakfast show, Moonman in the Morning, on which she often speaks candidly about parenthood.

In 2019, the mum-of-two revealed her daughter nearly drowned in a resort pool while enjoying a holiday with her dad.

“I got a phone call on Monday and the children were holidaying on the coast with Norm,” she explained at the time.

“The first thing he says to me is, ‘Sh*t! Sh*t!’ I said, ‘What’s the matter?’ He said, ‘I’m taking Matilda to emergency’. I’m like, ‘What do you mean? What’s happened?’

“He had gone to a resort pool with his friend and he was talking to his mate and he took his eye off her (Matilda) just for two seconds, it can happen to anybody.”

The-then two-year-old was spotted underwater in the pool, but appeared to be OK after the scare until she went into a “deep sleep”.

“Norm thought she might have just been napping and they were told, ‘Take her to emergency straight away!’ because secondary drowning, where’s there’s water on the lungs, is one of the biggest killers when it comes to children. You can still drown three days after you’ve been under the water.”