Jada Pinkett Smith recently opened up about her mental health battles, including a moment in her 20s when she was “extremely suicidal.
Mental health was the topic at hand on the most recent episode of the actress’ Facebook Watch series,
Red Table Talk. Pinkett Smith revealed that she has overcome her own share of mental health breakdowns.
“I had an emotional breakdown that definitely, I feel like, affected my mental stability,” she said. “I had gotten to L.A. and gotten a certain amount of success and realized that that wasn’t the answer…that that wasn’t what was going to make everything OK.”
“Actually, it made things worse,” she said of the fame she received in her early 20s. “And I became extremely suicidal and I had a complete emotional collapse.”
The mother of three even recalled reaching out to her mother Adrienne Banfield-Jones — who is also her
Red Table Talk co-host— for help.
“It’s like when you just don’t have control [over your] emotions, your thoughts — you feel completely and utterly out of control,” she explained. “I don’t even think at that particular point in time I understood what I was going through. Now, I know that it was what people would consider a nervous breakdown.”
“I was severely depressed, severely. And that was something that I battled with for years,” she went on. “Waking up in the morning was like the worst part of the day.”
Pinkett Smith has since been able to overcome to depression, but she admits that a lot of the healing came from “uprooting some false beliefs” and accepting “just what life is.”
