*Speaking to Gwyneth Paltrow at the Goop Health virtual summit over the weekend, Gabrielle Union opened up about her mental health struggles and battle with thoughts of suicide.
“I’ve had so many rock bottom moments as an adult, starting with being raped at 19 at gunpoint at my job,” said Union, E! News reported. “It just felt like every so many years there was some major catastrophic event that was happening in my life. You know, divorce, career setbacks, relationship issues. There’s always something that just lands you on your ass and you’re like ‘There’s no way I can move on from this, I’ll never recover, I’ll never be the same.’ ”
“You have these mini deaths,” Union said. “You have to grieve the person you were before. And there have been times I’ve felt like I had to be reborn out of success because that comes with its own challenges.”
The actress said a fight with husband Dwyane Wade last year took her to her lowest point.
“I fell into something so dark in December that it scared me,” she said, noting that she was “able to get through it with talk therapy and diving into how I can regulate my hormones.”
READ MORE: Gabrielle Union Teams with Jemele Hill to Produce Comedy ‘New Money’ at Showtime
“Separating the symptoms from who you really are…to say that it’s a challenge, I don’t think I really have the words, or I lost them, to describe what these last few months have been,” Union added.
Elsewhere in her conversation with Paltrow, Union discussed her hormonal issues caused by perimenopause (transition period before menopause).
“I thought I was losing my mind,” she explained. “I thought I had early-onset dementia, Alzheimer’s. I gained 20 pounds overnight of water retention, inflammation, bizarre. I couldn’t think. Now, when I have to public speak in the last few months, I’m so anxious, because I’m like, ‘Am I going to remember words?'”
Union previously opened up about her mental health struggles with Taraji P. Henson on her Facebook Watch show last year. She also told Women’s Health Magazine that her PTSD has been “on 10” due to the pandemic and rising racial unrest in the country.
“The combination of a pandemic and this racial reckoning, alongside being inundated with (images of) the brutalization of Black bodies, has sent my PTSD into overdrive,” she said. “There’s just terror in my body.”
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