Jada Pinkett Smith reveals she felt "extremely suicidal" when she first found fame
Jada Pinkett Smith has opened up about feeling “extremely suicidal” at the beginning of her career in Hollywood.
During Mondays’ episode of 'Red Table Talk', the star’s Facebook Watch series, the 47-year-old spoke of the “nervous breakdown” she suffered when she moved from her native Baltimore to Los Angeles to become an actor.
“I had gotten to LA and gotten a certain amount of success and realised that that wasn’t the answer,” she told her co-hosts, mother Adrienne Banfield-Jones and daughter Willow Smith.
“[The success] wasn’t what was going to make everything okay. [It] actually made this worse.
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“I was extremely suicidal, I had a complete emotional collapse.”
The Matrix Reloaded actor admitted that, in the early days of her career in show business, she struggled to understand her mental health issues.
The mother-of-two added: ‘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.”
She explained she has since learned to understand that she was suffering a nervous breakdown.
Her mother said she "absolutely understood" what her daughter was going through at the time.
Earlier this year, the actor – who is married to actor Will Smith – opened up about the depths of her depression which once saw her considering taking her own life.
Following the recent suicides of fashion designer Kate Spade and celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain, Ms Pinkett Smith took to Instagram to pay her respects and discuss her own mental health issues.
A post shared by Jada Pinkett Smith (@jadapinkettsmith) on Jun 11, 2018 at 2:40pm PDT
In the caption of a side-by-side photograph of Spade and Bourdain, the actress wrote: "One thing I’ve learned in my life over the years is that mental health is something we should practice daily, not just when issues arise."
She later added: "Mental health is a daily practice for me. It’s a practice of deep self-love. May Kate and Anthony Rest In Peace. Many may not understand… but I do, and this morning I have the deepest gratitude that I pulled through."
