Professional Athletes Who Talk About Mental Illness
Mental Health Doesn't Discriminate: 10 Athletes Who Have Talked About Their Mental Illness
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In 2018, Love experienced a panic attack during a basketball game. The Cleveland Cavaliers helped him find a therapist, and he began speaking out about his mental health, something that he'd never done before. "So for 29 years, I thought about mental health as someone else's problem," he wrote in a personal essay for The Players' Tribune. "Sure, I knew on some level that some people benefited from asking for help or opening up. I just never thought it was for me. To me, it was form of weakness that could derail my success in sports or make me seem weird or different."
Love, now 31, said in a recent interview for the Aspen Institute about how he's coping during COVID-19: "The craziest part about this is — and mental health is — that it just doesn't discriminate. It doesn't care who you are, it doesn't care where you're from — your socioeconomic status, gender profile, race. No matter what it is, it can impact you."
Love deals with anxiety and depression, and he said during Yahoo's "Reset Your Mindset" event on May 20, "It just shows you that success is not immune to depression or mental illness, no matter how much you've accomplished in your life."