Jada Pinkett Smith may appear to have it all: a flourishing career, a beautiful family and loving husband, but she has revealed that it hasn’t always been so rosy. In fact, she went through some major struggles.

She recently shared on her Facebook video show Red Table Talk, that she did have a nervous breakdown at one point and contemplated suicide.

“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 The Independent. “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.”

She’s taken her own struggle to encourage and be there for others, like this past weekend after Pete Davidson shared a struggling message on Instagram.


“Pete Davidson … hang in there. There is a lot of help out here,” Pinkett Smith tweeted. “Surrender to some love some where around you … today! Right now! And then … let in the help that will become available.”

“I’m praying for you Pete. I’ve been there. It gets better,” she added.

This isn’t the first time that Pinkett Smith has opened up about her own mental health struggles. She did as well this past summer after the deaths of Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain, saying she had “often” contemplated suicide in the past — and that mental health “is a daily practice.”

With the suicides of Kate and Anthony it brought up feelings of when I was in such despair and had considered the same demise…often,” she wrote on Instagram. “In the years I spent towards my healing, many moons ago, I realized the mind and heart can be extremely delicate without the foundation of a formidable spirit.”

“What I eat, what I watch on TV, what music I listen to, how I care for my body, my spiritual practice, what people I surround myself with, the amount of stress I allow and so on… either contribute to or deteriorate my mental health,” she added. “Mental health is a daily practice for me. It’s a practice of deep self-love.”