CALMING INFLUENCE To some, DeRozan’s mental-health voice as loud as ever
Two and a half years ago, a couple of nights before the NBA All-Star Game, DeMar DeRozan screamed. That’s the way he describes it now, even if he never actually raised his voice.
Back then he was in a dark place, one he’s strong enough to admit he still visits from time to time, and he was tired of hiding. So with no plan and no expectations, he took out his phone and typed seven words into his Twitter application.
“This depression get the best of me,” DeRozan wrote, and if this was his scream, he was not counting on an answer. But he awoke the next morning to discover thousands of them, and a light flashed in the darkness.
It wasn’t just that he needed to talk about his. Other people did, too.
Jump ahead to this week.
Having become one of the world’s most outspoken and eloquent high-profile athletes on the subject of mental health, the Spurs guard
posted another Twitter message Tuesday, this time promoting his appearance on a virtual panel at ESPN’s Women & Sports Summit.
Below DeRozan’s tweet, there was a comment from a user with a grand total of eight followers:
“U don’t realize how much good ur doing bro.”
As it turns out, the person who wrote that reply is a 17-year-old kid named Raiq Ahmed. He lives in Vancouver, Canada, and back in 2014, he fell in love with both basketball and the Toronto Raptors and adopted DeRozan as his favorite player.
In a series of direct messages Tuesday, Ahmed explained he had family members who dealt with mental health issues and knew all about “the stigma of staying silent.”
“If a high-profile athlete like (DeRozan) can broadcast his mental health issues,” Ahmed wrote, “then I think it can inspire people who deal with this every day to talk about their issues as well.”
And see, even if this one little interaction didn’t seem like much, it’s exactly why DeRozan keeps talking. In the 30 months since his first Twitter post about depression, he’s learned that every time he mentions his struggles, it can lift just a tiny bit of burden off of somebody else.
Not all rescues are dramatic. And during the ESPN event Tuesday, when he thought back to that first Twitter message, he said he only wishes he could have spoken out sooner.
“To see the outpouring of positivity from people, of me giving a helping hand, in a moment when I had no clue that I was going to be able to help so many people, it made me feel even better,” DeRozan said. “Like, damn, I could’ve been saying some
thing (all along) if this was the case, because this is my true feelings …
“Having this conversation shows people how empowering it is when you speak your story.”
He’s not alone, thankfully. Since DeRozan started talking about mental health, other NBA players, including Cleveland’s Kevin Love, have echoed his sentiments, and DeRozan was joined on the ESPN panel by two other athletes who shared powerful stories of their own.
Gracie Gold, an Olympic medal-winning figure skater, talked about “brushing so many things under the rug for so long” that she battled depression and an eating disorder. Years ago, Molly Seidel endured similar issues — she said she lost so much weight that her bones became weaker and began to break — but in February she qualified for the Olympics in her first marathon ever and will compete for the United States in Tokyo next year.
And while it might have seemed odd to some to see DeRozan speaking at an event billed for women, his message was in part about the universal nature of fear. Just as girls who play sports can be hesitant to show any perceived weakness, boys have the same worry.
And DeRozan said he has to remind himself
that’s nonsense.
“I should not let my truth, or what I feel, discredit me when it comes to playing basketball,” DeRozan said. “A lot of guys struggle with that, getting in a place of not wanting to say something because, ‘We’re men. We’re not supposed to say that. This shows weakness.’
“I’ve learned being able to speak about it lifts the weight off your shoulders, off your spirit, off your heart, to be able to keep pushing even more.”
He’s not going to convince everybody of this, of course. People have been playing sports for centuries, and popular ideas about toughness can be difficult to change.
But for a 17-year-old kid in Vancouver? DeRozan is making the discussion just a little bit easier. After all, Ahmed figures that if it’s OK for his favorite basketball player to talk about this, it should be OK for him, too.
“Especially for athletes and males in general, mental health is not brought up often,” Ahmed wrote. “That’s why I think DeMar does a lot of good.”
And why that first scream was louder than he thought.