SPORT AND MENTAL HEALTH // (re: Football's Suicide Secret)

Come on up for the rising, Come on up, lay your hands in mine. Come on up for the rising, Come on up for the rising tonight - The Rising (2002)

Last night, once the news had finished, I started to get ready to hit the hay but then a programme came on that stopped me in my tracks and restrained me to my seat. This powerful film presented by footballer and PFA chairman, Clarke Carlisle, was called Football's Suicide Secret and it discussed the serious subject of depression within the sport. Having first aired on BBC 3 back in July I was shocked that I hadn't heard about it or seen it until now. Carlisle, who has suffered with chronic depression since his injury in 2001 playing for Premiere League side QPR, travelled around the country discussing the subject of mental health, which is surprisingly still seen as a taboo in 2013, with numerous ex-players and their families. The footballer shined a very strong light on the matter and showed the world what not only footballers go through but athletes in general once they fall from the height of the sporting world to the bottom of the pile. 

Depression and sport are two things that many people do not think can go together. Athletes are supposedly meant to be strong both physically and mentally, they are to show no weakness and power to victory without hesitation. But the truth is that sport is one area where depression festers almost quicker than anywhere else. The pressure to win week-in-week-out is an unbelievable amount of expectation to put on the shoulders of one person therefore it should not be shocking to people that many find it too much to cope with.

If a player had a broken leg or a fractured foot then we would excuse them for not playing because they would evidently be injured but an 'injury to the brain' as Carlisle puts it, is not there for all to see and thus people are more likely to shrug the illness off by saying the player should 'pull himself together'. This is why many athletes feel that they have to suffer in silence - in fear of being judged weak and incapable. This needs to change. When suffering from depression, English cricket captain, Freddie Flintoff, stated that he felt a lot of pressure to keep up a 'happy-go-lucky' public persona to manipulate the world in to thinking that he was in total control of his life and his sport. But why? We would not pretend to the world that our arm was fine if we had broken it.

It's thought that 1 in 4 people will experience mental health problems during their lives and double Olympic Gold medallist, Kelly Holmes, fell in to an incredibly tough period of depression before her magnificent 2004 Olympics. Suffering from multiple injuries and not being able to train for a lengthy period of time saw the British athlete turn to self harm in order to regain some control of her life -"I just came to the end of my hope. I became depressed and cut myself and got desperate for things to go right for once." The question is why and how was Holmes allowed to reach such a frightening point. Where was the support from her sporting organisation?

There are some steps being made in sport, as we saw in Tuesday night's documentary, to help athletes who are suffering from mental health issues but nothing of much substance on a mass scale as of yet. However, everything needs to start somewhere and we should be thankful that after years of suffering  mental illness is finally beginning to be recognised as an actual condition and not just a result of being emotionally weak. 

As Carlisle stated in the wonderfully made documentary, the FA (and this applies to all sports) need to develop strategies to help their athletes deal with depression in order for deaths such as Welsh Coach and ex-premiere league player, Gary Speed, not to be in vain. We should learn from these tragedies and do everything possible in order to prevent them from happening again within the game. 

Watch Football's Suicide Secret on iplayer here 
Mind - for info on mental health.