The day Jaden Smith saved his mum's life without knowing it
US actress Jada Pinkett Smith attends the 94th Oscars at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, California on March 27, 2022.
What you need to know:
- In January 2012, shortly after her 40th birthday, Jada started scouting for locations to end her life and settled for a steep curving mountainous road in California.
- She intended to make the suicide mission appear as an accident to spare her children the shame of knowing their mother had ended her life.
Jada Pinkett's life appeared grand for decades. She had a successful film vocation, she was married to Will Smith, who was the most bankable superstar in Hollywood, and she led a lavish lifestyle of fame and fortune. She also had the freedom and support to pursue creative outlets while parenting her adorable children, Jaden, Willow, and stepson Trey, from her husband’s first marriage to Sheree Zampino.
Jada had been portraying contentment to compliment the allure, attraction and magnetism of Hollywood's fabrication of a perfect life. Underneath the false embellishment of wellness were bouts of depression and overwhelming hopelessness that smouldered and escalated into raging suicidal thoughts.
Decades of untreated feelings of unworthiness that emanated from a strenuous fatherless childhood, watching her mother, Adrienne, battle with heroin addiction and being robbed at gunpoint twice in Baltimore had ultimately led to a miscarriage of mental stewardess.
During an uneventful day while driving down Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles, she experienced a torrential emotional breakdown dominated by anxiety, shortness of breath and a tidal wave of sadness. It speedily opened an ocean of desperation that gave way to an insatiable urge to stop living and an unbearable desire to end her life.
She contacted her mentor and actress, Debbie Allen, whom she had met on the set of hit sitcom A Different World. Debbie referred her to Dr Sally Grieg, a compassionate Los Angeles psychiatrist. She diagnosed her with clinical depression and prescribed Prozac antidepressants to suppress overbearing suicidal thoughts and overcome retractable mood disorders.
When Jada and Will began dating on Valentine’s Day of 1995, she informed him about her reliance on Prozac to cope with her mental tussles. She explains in her memoir, Worthy, that mental incapacitation knows no bounds and success in Hollywood doesn't make people impervious to despair. Will became her new Prozac as she stopped taking her medication and began drinking heavily.
The cover of Jada Pinkett's memoir, Worthy.
While filming the movie Jason’s Lyric in 1994, Jada had met Maxine Rennes, the head of the hair department, and their friendship blossomed as they continued working in other film projects. In early 1996, Maxine developed a thyroid condition, which caused her a psychological imbalance and severe mental breakdown. Jada persuaded her to travel back to Toronto, Canada, to receive medical care and live in a controlled environment under the supervision of her mother, Judy.
Weeks later, a distraught Judy phoned Jada and informed her that Maxine had committed suicide by jumping off her balcony, Jada was devastated. The mantra that she'd adopted in Cherry Hill, Baltimore, was always to conceal, suppress and ignore her emotional pain and focus on the next task. She had just completed filming Nutty Professor alongside Eddie Murphy and was in the middle of completing Set it Off in which she played a female bank robber.
Her lifelong best friend, rapper and actor Tupac Shakur invited her to a restaurant on La Cienega Boulevard, Los Angeles, for a mid-afternoon meal. The two had met at Baltimore School for the Arts as teenagers. When Jada moved to study at the University of North Carolina, Tupac would mail her surprise envelopes with money to help her cope with her college years as he toured the country with Oakland Hip-Hop group, Digital Underground.
Their relationship had grown into an established understanding of reciprocity. Jada instituted Tupac's inaugural television appearance in A Different World and he returned the favour by ushering in her movie career when he handed her a role in the 1993 film Menace II Society. When they met in the mid-afternoon meal in Beverly Hills, Tupac requested her to star alongside him in an upcoming film called Gridlock'd.
In the middle of the conversation, Tupac made unsubstantiated claims that Jada's street credibility had been consumed by her Hollywood success, leading Jada to walk out of the restaurant in fury. It would be the last time she'd lay eyes on her best friend. Eight months later on September 7, 1996, while she was on set filming a movie called Woo in Toronto, she received a phone call informing her that Tupac had been shot in Las Vegas. He died six days later and Jada's mental state took a downward spiral.
The memories of Maxine and Tupac haunted her with extensive grief and guilt and she started contemplating suicide once more. She states that waking up every morning became a laborious burden accompanied by calamitous thoughts and she always wondered if she'd make it to four in the evening.
In January 2012, shortly after her 40th birthday, Jada started scouting for locations to end her life and settled for a steep curving mountainous road known as Mulholland Drive in Ojai, California. She intended to make the suicide mission appear as an accident to spare her children the shame of knowing their mother had ended her life.
On the day she was due to execute her plan, her 13-year-old son, Jaden, who had no idea his mother was about to kill herself, introduced her to his friends, Moises and Mateo. They shared a story of how their father, Cesar, had taken a medical expedition to Peru to experience Ayahuasca, a psychoactive beverage made from an Amazonian plant. The drink had traditionally been used for centuries by indigenous cultures and folk healers in the Amazon forest to rehabilitate psychological conditions.
They referred Jada to a medicine woman who was eerily housed in Ojai, the same location she had planned to commit suicide. She began her dosage consumption of the drink to cleanse her mind, during a three-day retreat at the medicine woman's house.
Ayahuasca had the nastiest flavour she had ever tasted and mentally transported her into an altered reality that led to a psychological storm of frightening visions that finally waned into an emotional reprieve. The drink purified her negative thoughts, beliefs and energies. After the excursion, she was overcome by profound warmth in her heart that surged and cascaded her entire body. Her numerous years of high-functioning depression made way for overwhelmingly blissful harmony.
The writer is a novelist, Big Brother Africa 2 Kenyan representative and founder of Jeff's Fitness Centre (@jeffbigbrother).
