The cast and crew of “This Is Us” is still mourning the loss of one of their own, Jas Waters, who died at the age of 39 in 2020.
Waters worked on the second season of NBC’s flagship drama series This Is Us. She most recently wrote on Showtime’s Kidding. Her other TV writing credits include VH1’s The Breaks and Comedy Central’s Hood Adjacent with James Davis. She also has a story-by credit on the Taraji P. Henson feature What Men Want.
This Is Us creator Dan Fogelman said of Waters on Twitter, “This news took my breath away. Jas was absolutely brilliant and had so many stories still to tell. She made an indelible mark on our show and my heart breaks for her loved ones.
The Los Angeles County Medical Examiner-Coroner just released Waters’ cause of death Thursday, writing she had died by suicide.
Reports are coming in that it was by hanging herself.
But how can this be? Jas was a beautiful Black woman, who was also successful in Hollywood with accolades from her peers and notable stars. It seems like she had everything going for her. So what happened?
Many take a look back at her social media and try to piece together some sort of reason or find the point when she might have begun to feel this way. Some see a few questionable areas where she may have been feeling like something’s wrong. Take a look at some of her tweets from 2019 below:
Maybe the better question to ask is, what happens in the minds of Black women in general who commit suicide?
Anxiety disorders are the most common mental health disorder in the United States. According to the Anxiety and Depression Association of American, data shows that for Black women, anxiety is more chronic and the symptoms more intense than their White counterparts.
Out of four primary subgroups in the United States—white males, black males, white females, and black females—the latter group, black females, has and has always had the lowest rates of suicide, according to a report by the Centers for Disease Control.
But many things contribute to the anxiety and suicide of Black women that we don’t talk about enough, like workplace anxiety. In the workplace, Black women often find themselves the only one or the first one. In these situations, they have been taught that they have to be twice as good to go half as far, that they are representing the race and that they…