Mental Illness, Neurosis, Depression and Suicide

Yeah, paywalled.

What’s the gist, MrK?

Good looking young wealthy sportsman with everything to live for suddenly can't cope with life but luckily has the support group around him to identify it and start to deal with it (with a bit of a wary note about what might happen to him once he leaves the sport/retires). 

Moral of the story - depression, like cancer, is a qunt which doesn't discriminate.

So, three current Oz players have been affected by the black dog - Maddison, Reeks FFS and Puck. This is prolly is under incidence rates. Good luck to the three of them.

JGK wrote:Good looking young wealthy sportsman with everything to live for suddenly can't cope with life but luckily has the support group around him to identify it and start to deal with it (with a bit of a wary note about what might happen to him once he leaves the sport/retires). 

Moral of the story - depression, like cancer, is a qunt which doesn't discriminate.

..... And you are right Mr K. Depression along with psychotic disorders knows no class, gender, language or cultural differences. Happily the science is slowly catching up.

I can't point to any stats but cricket does have a sad history of ex-players taking their own lives, including Bairstow Sr.    I vaguely recall the rate is about double the general population. 

David Frith wrote a book on it about 30 years ago - something like "By His Own Hand".

Let's see if this works:

Spoiler:

Thanks Mr K, a fine article.

Do you know, it's interesting the quirks that fate can throw up. This evening, out of sheer boredom, I realised that I hadn't been on here for a while. I don't have the forum book-marked anymore because - to be brutally honest - I've fallen out of love with the game nowadays and I'm not especially bothered about discussing cricket or its nuances. My cricket enjoyment nowadays is derived from looking at the scorecards at close of play, and the watching of highlights of the occasional (and increasingly rare) god match that comes along. So, as it is, I came on here because it's an old habit that I momentarily reverted to.

It seems odd to me to see one of my own posts bumped up here after so long, as if I was meant to look upon it now, from a different perspective, and see for myself, in the cold truth of hindsight, who I was and who I have become. Truthfully, I don't recognise that person anymore. I'm not at all convinced I was ever mentally ill. I think I was depressingly young and naive, devoid of the kinds of experience that teach you harshly exactly how the world operates, especially in terms of your capabilities within it. I put too high a price on things that weren't especially important, and I identified too much with the idea of who I was that I had built up in my mind. I wanted to fit in, but I wanted to be edgy, too.

I didn't believe either that my persona was at all changeable, malleable, that I could be somebody that I was not, and that I would in time find comfort in my own skin and step away from the boy to become a man. You can see it really in a lot of my old posts if you read through them. There is a distinct sense of an insecure, attention-whoring child, screaming at everybody who would listen. "Look at me," I yell, "Look at me." At that point in my life, I was drawn to the same kind of person. I once fell for a girl with that same kind of attention-whoring personality, and it nearly destroyed me. And I laugh at those things now - the person I was, and the people that I was drawn to.

I had to learn for myself the apathetic nature of the Universe. I had to learn to let go of toxic people, and to let go of my own toxic thoughts. But, in time, I did. And it wasn't because I was particularly special or interesting, it wasn't because I was strong or brave or any of the bullshit you see attributed to anybody who does anything nowadays. It was because I was alive, and there was plenty about life that I enjoyed, and that I felt then, as I do now, that there was plenty I had left that I wanted and needed to do. There are still a great many things that elude me, and seeing this post now seems particularly serendipitous because, these past few weeks, I have lamented some of the things that I am missing, and chided myself for not yet having found them. I remember 6 years ago that I was missing things too, and that here, now, I have found some of them.

It's nice to know that by getting up, and getting on, there's a good chance I can yet find those things.

Good on you Chic. Reading that thoughtful observer post has lightened an otherwise gloomy Sunday morning here.

Really pleased to see you up and taking on life.