‘I have made my way back from the lowest you can be’
Paralympic champion Lauren Rowles has fought depression and ADHD but is finally finding contentment, writes Fiona Tomas
Lauren Rowles has not told this story before. In doing so, she hopes it will help others.
Less than three months after becoming a double Paralympic champion at last year’s Tokyo Games, she contemplated ending her own life. She was put on suicide watch for weeks until, one night last year, she reached crisis point.
“I ended up in a really dark place. The whole of December, I didn’t really speak to anyone. I wasn’t really on this planet,” says Rowles, in her first interview with a British newspaper about her depression. “Just before Christmas, I decided I’d had enough and wanted to take my own life. That was the lowest point anyone can get to, and I had to make my way back from that.”
The British rower cannot pinpoint a moment when, in her own words, she began to “spiral”. But she recalls the agonisingly long nights lying awake in bed, tortured by her thoughts and numbed by a feeling of emptiness and dread.
The 24-year-old had achieved her goal of defending Paralympic gold in Tokyo, but it did not seem enough. She craved a sense of purpose – but could not find one.
Through therapy, Rowles dragged herself out of that dark hole and began to gain a deeper understanding of why she had hit rock bottom. After Tokyo, she had thrown herself into a schedule of media appearances and outreach work in her local community. Each time, she would tell her story – the one where doctors had told her she would never make it to the Games after spending two years out of the sport recovering from spinal, hip and arm surgeries in 2017 and 2018. The experience should have been cathartic, but Rowles became disillusioned.
“I felt worse than I’d ever felt in my life,” she admits. “People were just not impressed by what I did any more. I like to do things to impress myself, but coming back from Tokyo was a bit deflating because I’d done my job. I felt like I hadn’t done anything that was ‘wow!’ in my mind.
“I got consumed by going around, telling the story, and showing the medal. It can become quite confusing because you’re almost retelling the trauma from your life for other people’s enjoyment, in a way. I started realising that.
“I was going around talking about things that had been quite difficult, the injuries and setbacks. I didn’t think I’d emotionally processed it.”
As she talks, by the side of the Redgrave Pinsent Rowing Lake in Caversham, Rowles strokes her French bulldog, Dora, perched on her lap. The animal is blissfully unaware of the healing role she has played in her owner’s life ever since Rowles and her partner Jude Hamer, the GB wheelchair basketball player, read up about pet therapy this year.
Rowles is no stranger to trauma. She became a wheelchair user at 13 after developing transverse myelitis, an experience with which she only fully came to terms in adulthood. After the 2016 Rio Olympics she was so “riddled” with anxiety she needed medication, and was unable to leave the house – a consequence she now realises was in part because she was living in the closet about her sexuality. “Coming out was a huge part of my therapy,” says Rowles who, along with Hamer, takes pride in being a LGBTQ+ advocate in sport. “Now, I can express myself a lot more and just be myself.”
She experienced another life-changing moment this year, when she was diagnosed with ADHD, which affects around two per cent of UK adults. It was like discovering a piece of a jigsaw puzzle that had been missing all her life. So liberating has her diagnosis been that Rowles has come off antidepressants and her anxiety has subsided. “My mind was cleared of a lot of stuff and when I came into training, I could just focus. Getting that diagnosis has been really powerful. It’s been awesome to finally have someone say, ‘You’re not weird’.”
‘I felt worse than I had ever felt in my life. People were just not impressed by what I did any more’
Then Covid hit. Rowles was in hospital for a month, the illness left her with severe weakness down one side of her body and at one point she was unable to feel her arms or legs. “One morning I woke up and I couldn’t breathe at all,” says Rowles, who has an autoimmune condition. “I was feeling really drowsy. I was more worried about my chest because I wasn’t coughing anything up. I ended up in hospital with a chest infection.”
Her return to competition, last weekend, was impressive. Rowles won two golds at the International Para-rowing Regatta in Italy, including victory in the PR2 women’s single, the first time she had raced in a single boat since 2019. “Every day is a battle and I don’t feel like I’m at my ‘A’ game,” says Rowles, who will compete at the first World Cup of the season in Belgrade tomorrow. “I’m not in the best place that I’ve ever been in my life, but you know what? I’m here and I’m trying and I’ve learned that’s a win.”
Rowles says British Rowing has been “amazing” in providing ongoing support, alongside her private psychiatrist. “I wanted something refreshing after Tokyo, something new to work on,” she says. “I don’t yet have the singles title at World Championship level, so I want that. I want to push my own potential to the limit.”
“The future looks bright,” she says. “I’m learning about my brain and how it works and learning to work with it as well. That’s been such a powerful process for me, and one which I’m still going through now.”