Jada Pinkett Smith shared the depths of her mental health struggles in the latest episode of her Facebook Watch series,”Red Table Talk”, released Monday.
In Monday’s episode, Pinkett Smith welcomed musician Kid Cudi to talk about his mental health struggles. (Pinkett Smith, 47, co-hosts the show with her daughter, Willow Smith, and her mother, Adrienne Banfield-Norris.) Prior to Cudi’s appearance, Pinkett Smith spoke of her own plight.
“I had gotten to L.A. and gotten a certain amount of success and realized that that wasn’t the answer,” the mother of two recalled of darker days, she estimates took place when she was 20. “That that wasn’t what was gonna make everything okay. It actually made things worse, and I became extremely suicidal, and I had a complete emotional collapse.”
“It’s like when you just don’t have control over emotions, your thoughts, you feel completely and utterly out of control,” she continued. “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.”
“You cannot manage yourself,” she added. “Every moment of the day, you’re talking to yourself, trying to keep yourself on track… (trying to keep yourself) from hurting yourself, trying to (keep others) from realizing something’s wrong, but they know something’s wrong, because every minute I was just bursting into tears and didn’t know why.”
“I was severely depressed, severely. And that was something that I battled with for years,” she added. “Waking up in the morning was like the worst part of the day.”
Pinkett Smith said “guilt and shame” accompanied her success because of those she had to leave behind. She said she took Prozac to help remedy the situation until she began to experience side effects.
Pinkett Smith says now she no longer suffers from depression. “I also think that I had to uproot some false beliefs,” she said. “I had to just let go and just come to terms with just what life is.”
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