“On November 5th, right after halftime against the Hawks, I had a panic attack.
It came out of nowhere. I’d never had one before. I didn’t even know if they were real. But it was real — as real as a broken hand or a sprained ankle.”
Those are the words of NBA champion and five time all-star, Kevin Love, in his “The Players Tribune” article named “Everyone Is Going Through Something”.
Mental illness within sports has begun to gain some spotlight since Love’s article broke the news of his panic attack at halftime of a game in early November.
According to Mayo Clinic, “examples of mental illnesses include depression, anxiety disorders, schizophrenia, eating disorders and addictive behaviors.”
After that spotlight was shined, an article from Bleacher Report came out on June 18, 2018 talking about Nate Robinson and his battles with depression. “The NBA gave me my depression,’ Robinson says ‘I’ve never been a depressed person in my life.”
The issue of depression has reached everywhere, including Farmville, Va. Where graduate student and member of Longwood’s men’s basketball team, Damarion Geter, has openly talked about his struggles with depression symptoms.
“You lose interest in doing a lot of things, you probably want to be by yourself more often, and it’s a change in personality. Like you don’t feel like yourself, and you feel empty.” said Geter.
The causes of depression are almost impossible to determine because they can be different for whoever the person maybe.
For Geter though, he noted the cause being multiple things that mounted over time, but the main cause being his battles with injuries.
“I would say its a combination of things, but for me, I think my injuries brought it about. That’s from the standpoint that it was my first major injury and first time missing an entire season” said Geter.
The Dayton, Ohio native tore his labrum and was forced to miss the 2015-16 season, and then took on a leadership role as a student assistant coach and began his rehab to return to the court for his redshirt-junior year.
“Throughout life you’re taught if you put the work in and you work hard, you’re always gonna reap the benefits,” he said.
That wasn’t the case for Geter however, as when that season came around he was a starter for the first three games before he suffered a foot injury that made him miss a second straight season.
With these injuries and missed gametime, the depression symptoms began to sink in for Geter. He used the analogy of a sinkhole to describe how “one thing leads to another, and another.”
This is an interesting analogy because this would often be referred to as a snowball effect. But with depression, something that slowly pulls you down, maybe the sinkhole is exactly what it is.
Geter went back to talking about the desire to be left alone, and how its a dangerous one. He said it can lead to someone getting inside their head, thus creating a never-ending cycle of battling depression.
“Once you’re by yourself and those thoughts happen, there's no one there to encourage you” said Geter. “You start to think about all the negative stuff that’s happened in your life before that has lead up to this.”
A sinkhole indeed.
Robinson’s, and Geter’s depression do share a similarity however, and its that they had their identity taken from them.
The 11 year NBA vet when talking about his depression pointed the blame to how his personality didn’t mix well with the culture NBA teams and coaches want. Therefore, he feels he couldn’t be himself and be able to play basketball.
It can also feed into the “athletic identity” theory, which states, “Athletic identity is the degree to which an individual identifies with the athlete role and looks to others for acknowledgement of that role.”
In turn if something is done to take that “athletic identity” away, it can be a cause to battling with depression.
“I would say more than half of athletes suffer from some sort of depression or anxiety,” said Geter.
“Just because they play a sport it doesn’t diminish the possibility of them having mental health related issues, and in some cases we would see a higher risk of that,” said Rick Canter, the Associate Athletics Director for Student-Athlete Enhancement for Longwood.
Studies back this up as well. According to a journal from the ASCM (American College of Sports Medicine) published in Jan. 2015 stated that “Depression affects an estimated 6.7% of today’s adult population in a 12-month period”, however, “findings from these studies suggest that the prevalence rate of depression among college athletes ranges from as low as 15.6% to as high as 21%.”
In other words, anywhere from two and a half, to as high as three and a half times more, likely that a student athlete deals with depression compared to the average persons.
Another cause from this might be from the stretched out workload, as well as, trying to make everyone happy.
“It’s just a simple fact that there are so many outside forces that you have to encounter. You have your family, who always want you do to well. Then you have your friends, and then if you play sports, you have people from high school and back home, and they want you do do well. You have your coaching staff you have to impress, then your weight lifting coach, then you have to do class, and you have yourself too at the end of the day,” said Geter.
All of this shows the amount of stress that a student-athlete may amount, and that stress can lead to depression, which has effects of its own.
“It brought up a lot of anger, especially in the beginning, ” the soft spoken Geter said. All before he told the story on a time he was planning for an upper-body workout, but upon getting to the gym, his strength coach had made a low body work out for that day.
“It just set me off. It's those little things that go back to the personality changes” said Geter.
Athletes like Geter and Robinson also don’t get any help in his process from society, where being a male has a stigma of being strong and not showing any emotion.
“It was a big weight on me. Honestly it was a lot on myself as well, just the fact that growing up you’re thought to be tough, and tough is not talking about your feelings,” said Geter. “Then growing up, I didn’t really talk much about my feelings, and I don’t know even think my family back homes knows I went through counseling.”
“Naturally, with male student-athletes I think that stigma comes up and you see that sometimes they’re less likely to want to address the issue,” said Canter.
Depression is an uphill climb, or a struggle to rise from quicksand. It’s a process. There’s no magic medicine to make it go away in a week to 10 days.
“For me it was a long process, and I don’t know if its a process I’m fully over with yet, but I feel like I’m in a better spot with it,” said Geter. “I know for me, it got to a point to where I sought counseling because I thought it was another avenue to reach out and I knew the counselor didn’t have an agenda for me.”
Between counseling, and the many different helplines open for people to call as well as close friends and family, there are many different ways to fight depression. The key though is that you must seek it out. So, if you find yourself battling depression, go out and find the help needed so you can be retrieved from the “sinkhole”
