Jada Pinkett Smith shared that experimenting with ayahuasca helped her to heal mentally and overcome suicidal ideations.
“The suicidal thoughts completely went away,” the “Girls Trip” star told People in an interview published Wednesday while reflecting on her first trip on the psychedelic drug.
“Ayahuasca helped me. It gave me a new, intimate relationship with myself that I had never had before.”
Pinkett Smith, 52, revealed that she started experiencing thoughts of suicide when she turned 40.
“I was in so much pain. I couldn’t figure a way out besides death. So I made a plan,” she said.
The actress, who struggled with alcohol and drug abuse issues, said that while she and her husband, Will Smith, seemed to have it all, she was crippled by her mental health struggles.
“While I was really living the dream, I hit a huge wall — a massive amount of depression,” she explained. “I think that I looked at having outside sources to supplement for the voids that I was feeling inside.”
Pinkett Smith started hearing voices in her head telling her she was not “worth anything” and that she should kill herself. Soon after, she began plotting her own death.
“I started looking for places, cliffs where I could have an accident, because I didn’t want my kids to think that their mother had committed suicide,” she said.
The “Red Table Talk” co-host shares son Jaden, 25, and daughter Willow, 22, with Will. The “Hitch” actor, 55, also has a 30-year-old son, Trey, with his ex-wife, Sheree Zampino.
Pinkett Smith shared that it wasn’t until she overheard Jaden talking with friends about the positive benefits of ayahuasca that she saw a way out of the darkness.
“When Jaden came to me that day and he’s like, ‘Mom, you got to hear this. My friend’s dad, he had this experience. I need you to come in here and listen.’ I’m like, ‘I’m there. What is it?’” she recalled.
The “Nutty Professor” star’s ayahuasca experience “opened up a whole new world of healing,” which she is “so grateful for.”
Pinkett Smith previously discussed how psychedelics helped her overcome depression.
“It’s not successful for everybody,” she said of therapy and prescription medication during a “RTT” discussion in 2021. “I struggled with depression for so long. And the thing about the plant medicine is it helps you feel better but also solves the problems of how you got there in the first place.”
The Emmy winner even encouraged her adult children to try psychedelics.
“I think it was my mom, actually, that was really the first one to make that step for the family,” Jaden said at the Psychedelic Science conference in Denver in June. “It was just her for a really, really long time, and then eventually it just trickled and evolved, and everybody found it in their own ways.”
The “Icon” rapper also insisted that using psychedelics helped him form closer relationships with his sister and his half-brother in a “profound” way.
“Siblings can argue so much and fight so much, and lord knows me and my siblings have done so much of that in the past,” he said.
“But the level of love and empathy that I can feel for them inside of the [psychedelic] experiences and outside of the experiences has been something that’s profound and beautiful.”
Jaden said that he and his family members were able to work through arguments thanks to the drugs.
“It will actually help us to open up our minds to get out of the old ways of thinking that got us into lots of these arguments and open it up so that it just releases and makes room for you to work it out and massage it out until it’s completely gone,” he said.
Meanwhile, Will has also been an advocate for doing psychedelics and even admitted to doing ayahuasca 14 times in Peru over a two-year period around 2011.
The “King Richard” star told David Letterman in 2022 that he saw visions of his family and career falling apart.
“I realized that anything that happens in my life, I can handle it. I can handle any person I lose, I can handle anything that goes wrong in my life, I can handle anything in my marriage, I can handle anything that this life has to offer.
“That’s part of the psychological training that happens in ayahuasca.”
Ironically, Will’s career spiraled after he notoriously slapped Chris Rock during the Oscars in March that year.
Pinkett Smith also disclosed to People that she and Will, who married in 1997, have been quietly separated for seven years.
If you or someone you know is affected by any of the issues raised in this story, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988 or text Crisis Text Line at 741741.
