Skater felt ‘broken’ by depression
● Olympic skater says ‘it’s OK to speak about it’
Speed skater Elise Christie has opened up on taking anti-depressants and committing self-harm as she admitted to being left “broken” by anxiety.
The three-time Winter Olympian, who said she was “excited” again about skating and life, hopes to help others by speaking publicly about her mental health issues, saying: “I want to show people it’s OK to feel that way and that it’s OK to use medication.”
Speed skater Elise Christie has revealed she resorted to selfharm amid death threats and a battle with depression.
The Scottish three-time world champion received threats and abuse online following the Sochi Games in 2014, resulting in the onset of anxiety, and later depression.
She then suffered high-profile short-track failures at the 2018 Winter Olympics and subsequently split up with her boyfriend, Hungarian skater Shaolin Sandor Liu.
But now the 28-year-old from Livingston has stopped taking antidepressants and is “excited” about skating and life. She hopes that by opening up about her mental health issues, she can help others.
“I want to show people it’s OK to feel that way and that it’s OK to use medication,” she told BBC Sport.
The three-time Winter Olympian said she developed anxiety after receiving the death threats at the 2014 Games.
“It was quite debilitating,” she said. “I was in bed a lot. I was struggling to keep up with normal life. I couldn’t get things done.
“I hit a massive low when I got injured in [the last] Olympic season and I just ended up broken.”
It was in the summer of 2017 that, after a conversation with a psychologist, she decided to seek further help and was prescribed antidepressants.
“People are scared to say they’re on medication. I don’t know why, but I was the same,” Christie said. “But people are on them because they need it. I couldn’t function without them at that point.
“People were saying how strong I was the way I handled both Olympics, but I actually wasn’t coping and I didn’t want to admit that because of how people perceived me.
“Some people feel weak to admit it. But depression is an illness, not just sadness, and I want people to think it is OK to speak about it.”
Christie says medication helped her to manage “dramatic emotions” in the run-up to the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang.
Atthegamesinsouthkorea, she fell in the 500m final and 1500m semi-finals, and raced with an injured ankle in the 1,000m heats, where she was disqualified. She separated from her boyfriend after the competition and said she reached her lowest ebb.
“At my lowest moment I did self-harm – not badly, but I was still doing it because I didn’t know how to cope without it,” she said.
“After everything that had happened – and I was on my own – I just couldn’t deal with how I felt any more.
“Because you have a physical pain, I guess it just takes away the emotional pain. I would never have shared that, I wouldn’t have wanted anyone to know. And that’s the point – you can get to these points and you can get out of it because I have.”
Christie said that by speaking out, she hopes more people can be more open about mental health and dispel any stigma around the use of medication. “There is a lot of other athletes going through this. There’s a lot of normal, dayto-day people going through the same thing,” she said.
“It’s fine to be on the medication. I felt at times I was never going to get off them or feel better.
“But I just knew when I was ready to come off the medication, because I was ready to accept the emotions and accept that I was going to feel up and down at points.”
“People were saying how strong I was the way I handled both Olympics, but I actually wasn’t coping and I didn’t want to admit that…”
ELISE CHRISTIE
Scottish speed skater
Anas Sarwar is a senior Scottish Labour MSP. He was deputy leader of the party for three years and stood against Richard Leonard for the leadership in 2017. In short, he is someone worth listening to and taking seriously – particularly for those in his own party.
And yet, astonishingly, on a matter of highest concern – his allegation that a Labour councillor made a racist and Islamophobic remark – the party’s National Constitutional Committee decided not to hear what he had to say because of Kafkaesque standards of bureaucracy.
According to Sarwar, he was given four days’ notice that a hearing would be held, but when he arrived to give evidence he was told he could not do so because he had not given two weeks’ notice.
After failing to hear from the accuser, the NCC unsurprisingly decided there was no case to answer. How could there be if they denied Sarwar the chance to make his case?
It is important to stress that the councillor concerned, Davie Mclachlan, denies the allegation. However, whatever actually took place, the Labour Party’s investigation hardly inspires confidence. To his credit, Leonard
said that Sarwar’s complaints “deserve to be treated seriously”, adding that “clearly more still needs to be done” to improve the system.
For his part, Mclachlan said he would never recover from the stress that the “false accuations” had caused his family. Even Sarwar sounded a note of sympathy, saying the 15 months it had taken for the process to conclude had not been fair on either of them.
But in words that some who have complained about antisemitism within the Labour Party may recognise, Sarwar said he had been “left with the sad impression that Islamophobia is one of the last acceptable forms of prejudice”.
If there is any bright side to this, regardless of the truth of this specific case, it may be that Labour hasn’t been deliberately throwing out justified complaints about bigotry but instead doing so almost accidentally because of out-dated and flawed procedures.
Given the resurgence of “identity” politics, all parties must ensure they have robust disciplinary procedures that can fairly assess any claims of prejudice or they could find they are at risk of being overwhelmed by irrational hatreds once thought to have largely been consigned to history.