The voices kept coming back and I could not shut them up
MONTY PANESAR WAS ENGLAND’S CULT HERO BUT HERE HE REVEALS HOW HE WAS PLAGUED BY DEMONS
HE WAS a cricketing national hero but Monty Panesar suffered a spectacular fall when beset by mental health problems. Here Sportsmail serialises his brutally honest new autobiography The Full Monty...
My paranoia was deepening and my behaviour was worrying my parents, so my mum arranged for me to meet a family friend she thought might be able to help.
He referred me to a Harley Street psychiatrist and at one point i went to see a hypnotherapist, who specialised in helping sportsmen and women.
after that first meeting i was shaking uncontrollably. He said he’d never had a session like it and thought he’d broken something in me. ‘i think you’re suffering from low self- confidence. i also think what you’ve got is paranoid schizophrenia.’
i was stunned. Mental illness stalked my generation of english cricketers. one by one i watched it pick off my team-mates. Freddie Flintoff admitted he struggled with depression during his career.
He was possibly the second to last person you’d suspect of struggling with mental health issues. the very last person you’d think something like that would happen to was Marcus trescothick, but that was precisely the point.
When Marcus first admitted he’d been suffering from depression in 2008 i was shocked, but i didn’t think anything like that would ever happen to me.
in the wake of his revelations, the professional Cricketers’ association provided members with a booklet telling us what to do if we experienced anything similar.
if someone like Marcus could be struck down in his prime, something like that could easily happen to me — but i threw my copy in the bin.
i subsequently began to struggle with a different condition: paranoia. it affected my personality and seriously affected my physical health and my relationships with family and team-mates.
the depression started to take hold around the middle of 2012. around this time my relationship with my agent Dave parsooth broke down, and i’d lost another voice that might have kept me on an even keel. i’d staved it off in the winter but back in Hove, where i was playing for Sussex, the voices were coming back, and there was nothing to shut them up. ‘You’re no f****** good.’ ‘F*** off! What would you know about it?’
‘I know a s*** batsman when I see one.’
i was hoping it wasn’t as serious as it had been with Marcus. i clung to the fact that i still desperately wanted to play cricket and that as Marcus had been physically unable to get on a plane when his illness worsened, i couldn’t be that bad if i still wanted to go to new Zealand on the 2013 tour.
i went to get help and was prescribed anti-depressants. My head was almost permanently spinning and i was hearing all this white noise, but when i took them everything calmed down.
it was great, but the side-effects were worrying. the drugs increased my appetite. i’d always been around 13 stone, but i was eating so i much i ballooned to around 15 stone, and it showed.
Graeme Swann got injured and i had my role as england’s no 1 spinner back, but i was carrying 10 kilos of excess weight and my reactions were being dulled by the drugs.
the way my time at Sussex ended overshadowed everything else i did there. i can trace the roots of my own paranoia back to this period. they’d built the team around me, but i was becoming less and less nice to be around.
My team-mates began to fear my reaction if they dropped catches off my bowling. i’d think: ‘you are f****** doing this deliberately.’
that was a symptom of my condition. i went to the gym at Hove wearing a black puffa jacket. i thought i looked the business. as i strolled in, the first person i saw was my friend and Sussex teammate, Michael yardy. He smiled, we exchanged hellos and then he looked at my jacket and said: ‘Wow, you look like a footballer!’
it was an innocuous remark but for some reason it stuck in my head. as i was pounding away at the weights i heard a voice in my head. not a soft, soothing voice, but an angry, divisive and spiteful one, like Don logan, Ben Kingsley’s character in
Sexy Beast (right). ‘No he wasn’t!’ ‘He f****** was. He said you looked like a right c***.’
‘Shut up!’ i could have come clean as a player who suffered from mental health issues. this would have stopped people saying i’d let myself go, but how many people recovered from ‘outing’ themselves as mentally ill and went on to have durable careers as international sportsmen? now i had to make the choice. With an ashes summer ahead, i came off the drugs and entered a tailspin. With my form and reputation once again tanking, my chances of playing against australia now hinged on Swann getting injured again. i also wasn’t anywhere nearer the one- day squad and i was finding this increasingly hard to take. i knew i was alienating my team- mates over trivial things. For example, my shoulder was injured so when i was in the field i’d stop the ball with my boot and fling it back underarm. i thought i was managing the injury. they thought i was taking the p*** and a lot of reporters seemed to agree with them.