AceShowbiz - Jada Pinkett Smith has struggled with "bouts of depression" despite her fame and success. The 52-year-old actress - who is wed to Hollywood star Will Smith - has revealed that she experienced "overwhelming" feelings of "hopelessness" around her 40th birthday.

"For two decades, I had been putting on a good face, going with the flow, telling everyone I was okay. Yet underneath, bouts of depression and overwhelming hopelessness had smouldered until they turned into raging hellfire in my broken heart," Jada shares in her new book "Worthy" - an excerpt of which has been published by PEOPLE.

"Unwelcome feelings - of not deserving love - made it harder to understand the disconnect between the so-called perfect life I had achieved and the well of loss I carried with me. Therapy helped up to a point. It got me to forty! But to what end?"

Jada admits that she was a "chronic mess" at one point in time. The Hollywood star also described her kids as her "only motivation" to keep going.

Jada - who has Jaden Smith, 25, and Willow Smith, 22, with Will, while she's also the stepmother of Trey, her husband's son from a previous marriage - said, "I would later be diagnosed and informed that I suffer from complex trauma with PTSD and dissociation, but without this guidepost, I was a chronic mess with no fix, no possibility to heal."

"Every morning, waking up was like walking the plank of doom - could I make it to 4pm? If I could, I had survived the day. I always wanted to sleep, but I never slept well. My children could put a smile on my face and were my only motivation to keep me going, but more and more, I could feel myself losing my grip of connection to them."