Jet Li on His Daughter's Depression: 'My Whole World Suddenly Collapsed'

In the interview clip spreading across Weibo this weekend, the martial-arts star Jet Li — one of the most physically disciplined performers China ever sent to global cinema — sits with the veteran host Yang Lan and talks about the period his family nearly came apart. The subject is not his films. It is his younger daughter Jada's depression, and what the illness did to his idea of fatherhood. The conversation began recirculating on Saturday, which happened to be World Mental Health Day; the same day, Baidu's searches carried a myth-busting list from China's science-rumour platform and the Chinese Psychological Society titled, simply, "Stop misunderstanding mental illness".

Jada was seven when it started — she would hide under chairs, he told the audience, and at her worst she thought about ending her life. His account of that period is unusually blunt for a Chinese celebrity parent: "Suddenly, my whole world collapsed. I began to wonder what I had overlooked. When I started talking to her, I found I understood nothing at all about mental illness."

What he did next became the story's second act: he stepped away from work and, by his account, spent three years travelling with her. By 2019 she had worked through online study and every meditation and mindfulness course she could find, and had concluded, he said, that the problem she needed to solve was not just hers but her whole generation's. Three months of programmes across the United States and Europe followed. The turn came at an airport in France, in a text message he still quotes: "Dad, don't worry. I'm not going to give up on my life. I've found my home — and I want to use this method to help a lot of children." Since then, he says, father and daughter have been "like best friends" — the word he used, guimi (闺蜜), is the one Chinese women reserve for their closest confidantes.

Clips from a recent talk in Taipei, where the 62-year-old broke down on stage, gave the story a second wind. The timing matters: China marks World Mental Health Day with institution-led campaigns — the six-myth list ran on the same feeds — and the country has spent the past weeks arguing over its mental-health system, from the hospitals quietly renaming themselves to escape the stigma to a rock star speaking about despair that has no visible cause. Jet Li's own conclusion from the stage: humanity's next challenge, he said, will be more of a psychological one. His daughter, he added, now wants to take the methods that worked for her to other young people — which is what she promised him in the message from the airport: that she had found her home, and meant to share it.