I’M FIGHTING EVERY DAY...
World champ Selby opens up on his mental health battles
MARK SELBY’S dark days are behind him. Or so he hopes.
The four-time world snooker champ shocked the sport when he announced issues with his mental health earlier this year.
It was something of a paradox when he did.
On the baize Selby, 39, is viewed as uncompromising and tough in a sport where every shot carries pressure.
But the mask didn’t just slip in January when he announced, via social media, that he was “not in a good place” – it shattered on the floor into 1,000 pieces.
Scrape away the surface from this successful sportsman and Selby’s is a tale of heartache, triumphing against the odds in an unforgiving arena.
But it’s also one that could so easily have ended in tragedy.
Now, following six months of treatment, he is on the mend.
Selby said: “From where I was a few months ago, it’s like night and day. I’ve been speaking to a psychiatrist for six months and his message was, ‘Mental health issues don’t go away, you just learn to deal with it far better.’
“When I spoke out I wasn’t dealing with it well. In fact, I wasn’t dealing with any of it.
“When I’m at the snooker table I’m in control. I know how to handle my emotions.
“Away from it I was anything but that. I thought it would blow over. It didn’t – it just got worse.
“I was going through the motions, being beaten but not feeling anything. I wasn’t bothered. That’s when I knew I was in trouble.”
Selby’s backstory perhaps partly explains the suffering. His mum left home when he was eight years old. His dad died of cancer when he was 16.
That was tough, and the up-and-coming snooker star barely coped.
He said: “I grieved for about six months or a year when I lost my dad to cancer when I was 16. I didn’t have a great relationship with my mum.
“I felt I couldn’t go back into the house, knowing my dad wasn’t there any more.
“So I moved in with a friend. But for about six months to one year afterwards I wasn’t playing any more. I wasn’t practising.
I didn’t want to compete in tournaments.
“I wanted to curl up into a ball and hope that everything would go away. To the point where, at one stage, I did try to end my life a couple of times.
“My friend caught me once having taken an overdose. I thought, ‘I’ll take these tablets, fall asleep and that will be it.’
“I was found. I went to the hospital, they brought me round and pumped my stomach.”
Selby will line up at the British Masters looking to prove a point.
He said: “I didn’t do it for people to rally around me and put their arms around me and say, ‘Everything is going to be fine.’
“It’s great that they have but my way of trying to help myself was by speaking out. And I feel like it has.
“It will never go away, it will always be there somewhere. I feel as though I have it under control – for now, at least.”
I thought, ‘I’ll take these tablets, fall asleep and that will be it’