When talking about her new Facebook Watch series on ‘The View’, the ‘Hidden Figures’ actress claims that she and co-host Tracie Jade Jenkins are hoping to pick up a few tips for themselves as well.
- Dec 10, 2020
AceShowbiz – Actress Taraji P. Henson wants to use her new Facebook Watch series about mental health to show people what therapy is all about.
The “Hidden Figures” star is launching “Peace of Mind with Taraji” on Monday (December 14), when she and her best friend, Tracie Jade Jenkins, will welcome a series of guests to discuss issues prevalent in the black community – and how to process them.
“I just want people to see themselves in this whole mental health discussion,” she explained on America’s “The View“.
“What I really want to do is normalise this conversation, take the stigma out of mental illness, or mental health, because we really don’t talk about it in the black community.”
“We’ve always been told to pray your problems away, talk to your pastor, be strong, push through, and that’s just not healthy,” Taraji shared.
“And so, on the show, I want people to see that just because we’re celebrities doesn’t mean we don’t have problems; money doesn’t make your problems go away. So we have celebrities come on who identify with different mental issues, and then we have civilians, regular people, come on who are dealing with the same thing, and then you have a therapist… to give us tools, tools to deal with whatever the topic is of the show.”
And Taraji and Tracie won’t just be serving as co-hosts – they are also hoping to pick up a few tips for themselves: “I have my issues as well…,” the actress said, “so we’re there, just like the audience members, to learn.”
One of their celebrity guests was Gabrielle Union, who opened up about dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) relating to her harrowing rape experience during her youth.
Taraji, a longtime mental health advocate, told “The View”, “I think when people think about PTSD, they think about veterans, but PTSD, I actually experience it every time I scroll on Instagram and see a black name attached to a hashtag, who’s just been murdered, unarmed, hands up in the air (sic). That’s PTSD for me, so we’re really trying to educate people on the terms, (and) because we don’t talk about it, we really don’t know we’re experiencing some of these.”
Source: Television - aceshowbiz.com
