Taraji P. Henson has been discussing mental health on her new Facebook show #PeaceOfMindWithTaraji, and recently she revealed some of the personal thoughts she had during the pandemic.
While speaking with psychologist Dr. LaShonda Green and her friend and co-host Tracie Jade, Taraji revealed that she contemplated taking her own life.
She said, “For a couple of days, I couldn’t get out of the bed, I didn’t care. That’s not me. Then, I started having thoughts about ending it.”
She continued to explain, “It happened two nights in a row.”
She then mentioned that she had recently purchased a gun, and as she recalled that dark moment, she said she thought to herself, “Well if I could go in there right now and just end it all because I want it to be over.”
Taraji also mentioned how she thought it would affect her son Marcell Johnson, and remembered thinking, “‘He’s grown, he’ll get over it.’
The Empire star said that after two nights of those thoughts, she knew she had to tell someone about it.
“I felt myself withdrawing. People were calling me, I wasn’t responding. I just didn’t care. Finally, I’m talking to one of my girlfriends and I knew, I was smart enough to say, ‘I have to say it,'” Henson said, adding that “part of” her felt “ashamed.”
“I was like, I don’t want them to think I’m crazy,” she said. “I don’t want them to, you know, obsess over me or think they gotta come and sit on me.”
“So one day I just blurted it out, to my girlfriend. She called me in the morning and I was like, ‘You know I thought about killing myself last night,'” Henson said, taking a big breath and then adding, “‘Oh my god, I feel so much better. I’m not gonna do it now.'”
Henson said that opening up about her thoughts helped her overcome them.
