Cleveland Cavaliers star Kevin Love wrote an emotion article for the Players’ Tribune Tuesday about his own struggles with mental health.
The whole piece is worth checking out, and he goes in depth about counseling he has received. However, it’s the way he closes it up that I found to be the most interesting.
He wrote in part:
Mental health is an invisible thing, but it touches all of us at some point or another. It’s part of life. Like DeMar said, “You never know what that person is going through.”
Mental health isn’t just an athlete thing. What you do for a living doesn’t have to define who you are. This is an everyone thing. No matter what our circumstances, we’re all carrying around things that hurt — and they can hurt us if we keep them buried inside. Not talking about our inner lives robs us of really getting to know ourselves and robs us of the chance to reach out to others in need. So if you’re reading this and you’re having a hard time, no matter how big or small it seems to you, I want to remind you that you’re not weird or different for sharing what you’re going through.
Just the opposite. It could be the most important thing you do. It was for me.
It’s really a breath of fresh air to see how some of these athletes have come forward with mental health issues in the past couple weeks. First, Manziel came forward to discuss his own struggles with mental illness and bipolar disorder. Now, Love has come forward encouraging people to seek help and talk about his own struggles.
Pretty incredible that two of the most famous people in sports have come forward to discuss an issue that we’re honestly not nearly discussing enough. I understand that it’s hard for some people to understand the lives athletes live, but trust me when I say, they’re just as human as everybody else.
Not only are they just as human as everybody else, they also go through stuff most people can’t even imagine. The majority of people make their mistakes in private. Athletes make mistakes in front of the entire world. It’s a different kind of beast to be dealing with. They screw up a game, and they have to hear about it from everybody. You screw up something and most people will never even know.
Good for Kevin Love for opening a door and being open with people. I have a strong sense we’re going to start seeing more and more of this out of athletes.
