Jada Pinkett Smith: Will Smith is so 'supportive'

17 May 2018

Jada Pinkett Smith has praised her husband Will Smith for being "supportive".

Jada Pinkett Smith

The 46-year-old actress - who has 19-year-old son Jaden and 17-year-old daughter Willow with the actor - has admitted she suffered a breakdown when she felt as though she had lost touch with who she was, and has credited her spouse with being "understanding" about her situation and helping to guide her through it.

She said: "I was withered, curled up in a ball about to die. Will had always told me to put myself first, and I had never really understood what that meant. I think when I got more understanding about it, and he got more understanding about what that meant, it took a lot of communication. At the end of the day, Will is extremely supportive of giving me what I need."

The 'Girls Trip' star revealed that factors including raising her children, working on her marriage, her professional "persona" and "this world of Hollywood," contributed to her breakdown, and said that confronting her issues helped her to get back to her old self.

She added during a live Q&A session for her 'Red Table Talk' show: "For me, you have to grant yourself that allowance, and that's what I wasn't doing. I had to take responsibility for the fact that I wasn't granting myself the allowance and the freedom. I had to look at that and take responsibility for the life I had created for myself. You can't put that on somebody else. And it takes a minute for us to even get to that understanding. But once we're willing to have that responsibility, we realise we got all the power."

Jada first discussed her breakdown during the show's second episode, where she revealed that she was able to snap out of her low mood when she forced herself to find things that made her happy.

She said: "[I asked myself] 'What makes you happy?' And literally I had no idea, to the point where I didn't know how to dress myself. Fashion used to be my thing and I'm just now starting to pay attention to that again.

"All these women out here on Xanax, drinking Chardonnay, it saddens me how a lot of women are out here numbing themselves just to survive in a way that they've been told they need to be to have happy lives ... but are miserable."