Jada Pinkett-Smith opens up about extreme suicidal thoughts ‘I had a complete emotional collapse’
In a new episode of Facebook’s Red Table Talk, Jada Pinkett-Smith opened up about battling suicidal thoughts early in her career.
“I had gotten to LA and gotten a certain amount of success and realized that that wasn’t the answer,” she told her co-hosts mother Adrienne Banfield-Jones and daughter Willow Smith, according to PEOPLE. “It wasn’t what was going to make everything okay. [It] actually made this worse. I was extremely suicidal, I had a complete emotional collapse.”
She continued, “It’s like when you just don’t have control over emotions, your thoughts, you feel completely and utterly out of control. I don’t even think at that particular time I understood what I was going through.”
The award-winning actress admits that her depressive states plagued her for quite some time.
“I was severely depressed. Severely,” she reveals. “And that was something I battled for years. Waking up in the morning was like the worst part of the day.”
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The second season of Red Table Talk has explored a variety of personal issues including the troubles in Jada and Will’s marriage and Willow’s cutting.
Will Smith was candid about a time during their marriage that he felt he was failing his wife.
“There was a period where mommy woke up and cried 45 days straight, I started keeping track,” Smith says to Willow, with Pinkett Smith jokingly replying that he “missed some day.”
On another episode of the popular Facebook series, Willow opened up about the effect that the hit song “Whip My Hair,” that she released when she was just 10-years-old, had on her relationship with her parents and herself.
“I definitely had to forgive you and daddy for that whole ‘Whip My Hair’ thing. It was mostly daddy because he was so harsh at certain times,” Willow revealed on the show.
“After the tour and the promotion and all of that, they wanted me to finish my album,” she continued. “And I was like, I’m not gonna do that. And after all of that kinda settled down and it was like a kind of lull, I was just listening to a lot of dark music. It was just so crazy and I was plunged into this black hole, and I was cutting myself.”
Red Table Talk airs Monday on Facebook Watch.
