Elite athletes can battle hidden pain
Sports heroes ‘not immune’ to mental illness
CALGARY — Many of Canada’s Olympians are fitter and better looking than mere mortals and they’re among the best at what they do. It’s difficult to believe their worlds can be dark.
But Olympic athletes are not exempt from depression, anxiety or addictions. A French study concluded that “the prevalence of mentalhealth issues in athletes to be as high, if not higher, than in the normal population.”
“Because athletes have become our heroes, people have thought they just couldn’t suffer from mental-health issues,” Toronto sports psychiatrist Dr. Saul Marks says. “Just like the normal population, athletes too can suffer from mental-health issues.”
Two decorated Canadian Olympians know how it feels to compete at the highest levels in the world while dealing with depression.
Victoria cyclist Gillian Carleton was cutting herself and did not have the energy to get out of bed a year after she won a bronze medal in team pursuit at the 2012 Summer Games in London.
Carleton explained in a raw essay on bicycling.com last summer the toll her mental illness was taking on her as an athlete and as a human being.
“I was sick and unmotivated and just had a hard time getting my (act) together,” Carleton says now. “I felt almost like I owed it to teammates, friends and sponsors who invested in me to put it out there that ‘I swear to God, I am trying. I’m not sitting here getting paid to do nothing and it’s hard for me to even think about getting out of bed and training.’ ”
With a family history of addiction and an alcoholic father, speed skater and cyclist Clara Hughes always feared the same fate awaited her.
After winning a pair of bronze medals in cycling the 1998 Olympics, Hughes felt isolated and miserable. She cried every day in a bathroom stall during a national team training camp.
“You get the medal and have this success and after a few months you realize ‘this is the thing that is not going to make me happy or make me into who I thought I would be with this because I still am who I am,’ ” Hughes said. “Nothing outside of you, no medal, no success, no recognition is going to trump those feelings inside if they are there.”
Neither Hughes nor Carleton blame sport for their depression, but both tried to use sport as an escape from it. They mentally flogged themselves in the belief that if they were fitter and faster they would feel better about themselves.
The two women also say the physical, mental and emotional extremes required to win an Olympic medal can attract a mirror personality.
“Sport is a world where you travel within a bubble,” Hughes said. “It’s really, in a lot of ways, very unhealthy and in a lot of ways, attracts personalities that are able to go to such incredible extremes. I know that I’m an example of that.
“The highs I was able to bring myself to emotionally, that would lead to the physical output ... where I was able to go, I’m also able to go in terms of lows.”
“You can achieve great success, but at the same time there’s also the potential for you to crash and burn completely,” echoes Carleton. “There are a lot of athletes who are able to find that middle ground, but those like Clara for example, who have experienced a lot of success, there’s definitely a higher risk of getting into that high-low pattern.”
Obsessive compulsive and manic personalities are sometimes seen as the single-mindedness and drive necessary to be the best in the world. “It’s almost celebrated and accepted and in some ways, it helps an athlete win,” Hughes said.
Carleton, 24, rides professionally for Team Specialized Lululemon as well as Canada’s track cycling team. She said she was diagnosed with depression in high school. Carleton treats it with a combination of talk therapy and anti-depressants.
Hughes won another four Olympic medals, including gold, in speed skating. She then returned to cycling and retired after finishing fifth in the women’s road race in London in 2012.
Without the constant push toward a major athletic goal, Hughes thought emotional balance would come naturally. She was wrong.
“As the months went by ... all those voices in my head, all those things I would say to myself that were so negative and just so loathing towards myself, I was like ‘I thought those things happened in my head because of sport, that sport made me be that way towards myself,’ ” she explained. “I realized that’s just me and I have a lot of work to do.”
Maladies of the brain have historically taken a back seat to injuries in sport.
A former Canadian team diver, Marks was the first psychiatrist in the world to be appointed to an international sport federation’s medical committee when he was named honorary secretary of FINA’s sports medicine committee in 2009.
“The reason I think it’s taken so long is the stigma of mental illness,” Marks said. “It’s just in the last 10 years or so, the International Olympic Committee’s medical commission has really put out quite a number of consensus statements that are psychiatric related.”
That 2010 French study concluded the most common diagnosed disorders among athletes were anxiety and depression, but there were also cases of substance abuse, eating disorders and personality disorders.
As a spokesperson for the Bell Let’s Talk campaign, Hughes is an advocate for ending not only society’s fear of mental illness, but the aversion to even talking about it. That stigma also exists in the athlete population.
There will be Canadian Olympians competing in Sochi, Russia, who are dealing with mental illness, Hughes said. “I can tell you the biggest, strongest, bad-assed guys have talked to me,” she said. “It goes to show you can’t judge what you see on the surface as to what is truly underneath.
“Athletes are not immune to the statistic that says one in five Canadians — I believe it’s more one in three Canadians — are going to struggle with mental illness.”