Athletes and Mental Health: The Hidden Opponent | Victoria Garrick | TEDxUSC

you have to beat a team lift at 6:00 a.m. but you're accidently one minute late because you slept through your alarm your heart's pounding from sprinting to the gym but nobody cares that it's because you were up until 2:00 a.m. studying for an exam that you still don't feel prepared for you can feel the tension between you and your teammates who now to run sprints tomorrow at 6 a.m. because you were one minute late you start the lift and your mind's just not in the right place but it doesn't matter you have to lift and as soon as it's over you scarf down breakfast on your way to 8:00 a.m. class and you get there and your hair's still wet because you didn't have time to dry it the professor looks you and says where's the homework assignment but you forgot it how could you forget it you are supposed to be on top of everything so you sit there and you worry about what else you might have forgot and then noon you get a 30 minute break but it's not really a break because you use it to quickly make up an assignment you missed for last week's game and soon it's 12:10 and to you forty minutes does not feel like enough time to get on the court and be ready even though it actually is see you head over and it one practice is starting and you have to forget everything that happened in your day because it practice you have to perform you can't not perform there's someone better than you someone competing with you and someone in high school who just committed to be you so forget the zero on your assignment forget the test you're not prepared for forget the friends you haven't seen in weeks forget the argument you've been in with your parent play well pass well perform and when it's finally over you find yourself staring in the locker room mirror trying not to cry and you ask yourself is this how I'm supposed to feel my name is Victoria Garrick and I play volleyball here at USC I've been playing sports my whole life but never quite like this now in high school I didn't understand mental illness and usually when people say mental illness you know people tense up because talking about it is uncomfortable you might think oh I've heard this before or this doesn't affect me those are common thoughts to have I know because I used to think the same things I thought you know depression means you have serious family issues or you know you're born with anxiety I just didn't get it because it's hard to understand something you can't see or touch so when I got to college and began my career as a division 1 athlete I never thought I would struggle with these issues now I can't be the only athlete here and we definitely probably have some soul cyclers some neighborhood joggers so if you've ever you know had an injury torn a ligament sprained an ankle I just want you to raise your hand all right awesome that's like most of the room it's pretty common now I want you to raise your hand if you've ever had depression or anxiety you can put your hands down did you feel almost that tension or like that awkwardness we just created together did you maybe judge someone who raised their hand or were you afraid to raise your own hands because of what people might think one in four people suffer from a mental health issue which is 25% of this room right now what we just experienced together was a room full of people stigmatizing mental health dr. Jeffrey Jeffrey Lieberman defined stigma as dishonor or disgrace he says it's like the Scarlet a that Hester Prynne is forced to wear or the mark on Cain in the Bible it's this label that outcasts you from everyone else we stigmatize mental health in this same way and that's a societal issue that needs to change and while anyone can experience a mental health issue today I'm going to talk about mental health specifically in athletes because I have faced anxiety and depression through my experiences as an athlete so let me tell you a little bit about me when I first got to the USC volleyball team I was overjoyed let me preface this by saying I was not a top recruit okay I was not called by ton to Division one schools but USC was my dream scenario and I wanted it so bad and I knew I was good enough despite what anyone else told me so I emailed these coaches every day I called them every week I went in for extra reps in high school I sent them videos I called again until they were like okay you can walk on just like stop contacting us so eventually I got my spot but still these USC coaches did not think I would play one point but I had this fire this zest for competition and I didn't care that I didn't have the accolades that the other girls did so I kept working hard against all odds my freshman season I started and played in every single pac-12 match and we won the championship that's me on the left right there and what happened was there was this girl who wasn't supposed to do anything who now has a role on what at the time was the number one team in the nation mentally I started on this high right because I was living my dream but all of a sudden I began to feel differently I became anxious more anxious than I'd ever felt before I have five alarms to make sure I was never late but I never even used the five alarms because I woke up at 7:15 anyways due to my anxiety over being late and I worried about my athletic performance constantly on game days I worried what if I don't play well tonight what if the coaches benched me what if my passing sucks what if I didn't study the Scout enough there were times I would feel this knot in my stomach and my skin start to crawl and my hands start to shake and I as well with tears because I was so afraid to play and make a mistake because at an elite level mistakes are costly and on top of it I had school and exams and family in a social life and I couldn't handle everything coming at me so fast and just piling up at one time I want to take a second though to show you guys how this happened to me because to be ironic it is easier to understand something when you can see it so we're gonna look at a typical week in my life I'm gonna disclaimer this wasn't intended to be funny but as I wrote my talk I realized how much of a joke my schedule is so I had some fun with it so if you like to make light of a tragic situation like me you're going to enjoy this if not bear with me I have 16 units of class lets out a nice fat 5 our practice block then I have required tutoring maybe time to eat because I'm a human who does that sometimes also I need office hours probably with a professor who thinks his class is the only thing I have to do in my life then I have an exam which I probably only know 20% of so I'm gonna block out time to study in a really master that 20% on top of all my other homework and oops maybe I have 6 a.m. running because my teammates going through the same stuff I am and she was late one day but don't forget games on Friday and Sunday out of state so now I'm missing these days of class for travel secretly I'm kind of excited I'm missing class but the logical part of me is like what am I going to find to him the time to make up that work because pregame warmup starts not one not two not three but a whopping four hours before the game so if you thought I'd have time to make it up I actually don't and then it all restarts when I hop off my plane bright and early to do it all again and in the little time I have left um I like to cry and misery I wish I was kidding but if you look at the schedule in all seriousness you can see how this can overpower anyone it could overpower one of you all of a sudden I was thinking about what I have to do next what I can't be late for what I can't miss what could go wrong and it just kind of drove me off the wall and because I didn't have think I could have any of these illnesses because I was an athlete I battled depression for half a year without even knowing I was when I first became really unhappy it was in August and I didn't know how to describe it every morning I woke up I immediately despised the day um I didn't have the energy I didn't want to go anywhere I didn't want to see anyone or do anything at practice I just went through the motions I woke up I went to the practice block for five hours and I went to sleep and I did that again and again and again I was just depleted completely and utterly drained and do you know how much energy it takes day in and day out to not even succeed but just get by as a student-athlete it's exhausting and I told myself you can't feel this way Victoria you have nothing to feel sad about you're starting you have a great family you have good friends and I was confused because I was known to always be the most energetic the most bubbly and talkative and always happy so I said put on this face and just fake it but after a while I couldn't fake it I began to see a psychologist once a weekend that was weird being honest you know the first time I walked into the waiting room I was like oh my god I'm one of those people now like I have a therapist you know you imagine like there goes that voice stigmatizing mental health like therapies for weirdos I thought I'd like walk in and there'd be like this big yellow couch and like this box of tissues and they'd say like tell me your darkest secrets but like it's not like that it was actually very helpful so after a while of seeing her she suggested I try medicine antidepressants and I was immediately like what it's like when you've been dating someone for a while and they say I want you to meet my parents and you're like this is too serious now so naturally I refused the meds but of course my depression depression worsened I realized it wasn't something I could just eat a tub of ice cream over cry and be fine the next day the neuro chemicals in my brain we're literally not producing the way they once were and my serotonin levels were no longer high enough to keep my mood where it once was what I used to not be able to describe I could formulate into words I had this dark cloud over my head and it followed me everywhere it was there when I woke up it was there when I went to sleep it was there in practice every day passing balls and you know how hard that is when you have to be good at your craft every single day and all you want to do is lay into a ball and just cry I remember times during water breaks I would run to the bathroom and just saw because for five seconds I wanted my day to stop I never got to a point of self-harm fortunately and I never put myself in actual danger but I can remember a few times that I was biking and I thought you know if this car accidentally hit me that would stop my week that would give me the break I so badly need I want to show you some pictures that I posted during this time in my life what do we think of these just look at them Here I am with my friends at the party there we are looking cute and Christmassy over the right we're celebrating I look happy right because no one posts what they don't want you to see this photo on the left I was at that party for probably 20 minutes before I was so overwhelmed with all the people around me that I snuck out the back and went home alone I know my friend of the picture texted me and said hey where you go I lied so I ran into someone the photo in the middle we took like 50 pictures that night to find one that I deemed pretty enough to post on my Instagram completely staged and the one on the right I spent that night crying I was trying so hard to portray this life that I so badly felt I needed to have and this is a problem with so many people my age not just because of depression but because our culture has created this belief that we need to be achieving all the time in order to be happy right look what internship she got look what trip he went on it doesn't stop this constant scrolling of people who look like they're doing so so well that you sit back and say to yourself well what am i doing what do I look like why don't I look like her it's this flawed notion that says you need to be achieving to be happy and be valued if I'm on the USC volleyball team I'll be valued if I get this job I'll be happy at this point you're probably thinking why don't you quit I'm not on scholarship I could just quit why don't I just stop doing that I don't quit because volleyball is Who I am it's not a hobby or something I do on the side it's my life like most athletes and what that means is I have to learn how to manage my lifestyle because I have two more years left and you better bet I want to win a championship I have major depressive disorder single episode with anxious features I see my therapist now I take medicine I practice positive thinking I try to be authentic on social media into people but the biggest thing that stood with me is I sat back and assessed at all and I thought why why did it take me so long to acknowledge and accept my illness and I realized the culture that we live in is athletes does not make it easy for us to honor this if you think about it the culture of athletics preaches where there's a will there's a way the best don't rest unless you puke faint or die keep going mental illness is associated with weakness to appear weak is the last thing an athlete wants and we're always hearing about the grind right it's about the grind even if you're not an athlete I mean you've heard about the grind to me it means when you just feel like you can't do something but you do it when your thighs are burning and you're sweating bullets you run one more sprint when it's the fifth set and you just feel like you can't do it anymore but you go dig ten more balls like that's the grind but being a part of this culture makes it so hard for athletes to differentiate between what is hard work and what is pushing yourself too far what happens when this push through your workout becomes a push through a conversation a push through a day and all of a sudden a push through your life I know what the grind is I've started on this team for two years competing with girls who were supposed to blow me out of the gym and that's why it was so hard for me to honor what I was going through I was in practice thinking I don't want to be here today I just want to go home and rest and I said Victoria the gold er left she's here she's working hard she must want more than you you don't deserve to be here if you're not going to work hard I told myself I was weak for wanting a break and this is so true across all athletes because the stigma makes it so hard for us to come forward did you know that Serena Williams and Terry Bradshaw have had depression Serena Williams she's a legend okay she spent the world's number-one female tennis player seven different times and even someone like her can struggle with these issues but that's just stuff people aren't realizing let's look at concussions for example in 1933 the n-c-double-a Medical handbook said concussions shouldn't be regarded too lightly in 1952 the New England Journal of Medicine said players who've suffered multiple concussions should stop playing football not until 70 years later in 2009 did the NFL even acknowledge publicly that concussions can have long lasting effects on players so we're looking at something here where 20 years ago nobody cared nobody cared about concussions you think yeah banging your head together probably not safe no players we're told tough it out if your head hurts the way we're treating mental illness today is so similar to the way we treated concussions 20 years ago oh this athletes feeling depressed sleep it off oh that athletes having an anxiety attack tell them to calm down we need to make a change societally to make people care this much about mental health because I'll tell you this right now a physical injury is treated more serious in a psychological injury and that needs to change I could easily get the day off for a physical injury right because I'm limping you can see my ankle swelling but for an athlete to say I've been feeling depressed this week or I had insomnia Oh insomnia because of my anxiety you're just looked down upon and at this level no one wants to miss practice I mean that sets me behind the competition behind on my team but when the trainer can see you're injured they make you sit out because they can see your physical health is at stake but when no one can see your mental health it's just up to you to decide and someone like me who hates not being there my team will tell you this I hate not being there when they're sprinting without me and I'm injured it kills me so for me to walk up to them and say I have a completely uninjured and you can't see it but I'm not well and I need to rest today is so hard to do and with everything I've been through I've only done that once I'm here today for a greater population a silent population of athletes who thinks will be viewed as lesser doesn't have the courage to come forward or doesn't know that they can be a strong competitive elite athlete and have a mental health issue in 2015 the n-c-double-a conducted a survey they found that out of 2,100 athletes 30% reported they were intractably overwhelmed on depression and anxiety they said they've seen a general increase this is two years old this should be recorded every season if not every year and they do not even give us numbers on depression and anxiety and this is the most recent survey the n-c-double-a has done it infuriates me that's something so serious is being so clearly disregarded I did my own survey to show you guys that this is an epidemic I surveyed 100 men and women from Division one schools like Stanford Oregon Washington UCLA you name it and this is what I found when asked if they'd ever experienced in terms of depression or anxiety 69 percent said yes the statistic I gave you in the beginning was 25 when asked if they think the amount of time they need to spend on their sport is too much more than half said yes almost at 90% and the next one honestly devastated me when the results came in and it kept me up for a few days I asked them have you ever felt you experienced anxiety depression or an eating disorder but we're too afraid to tell anyone more than half that means those athletes today are somewhere and no one knows that they're struggling and about 80% agree with me that this topic is neglected throughout society my university gives me free medicine and free therapy and for that I am so grateful but so many other athletes like me don't get that opportunity because this issue is underrated and they don't have the funds due to the extreme time demands and the and the pressure that we athletes feel we need to make we need to just be very aware of how athletes are feeling across the country and consistently be evaluating them and athletes need to be aware of their mental health so that they can learn how to manage this lifestyle I love my team they are special girls and I love the sport of volleyball that's why I can't let it go but as I continue my next two years I hope that I hear this conversation get louder I hope mental health stops being stigmatized for all people and I hope that one day a person like me can get on this stage ask a question about mental health and no one will think twice about raising their hand thank you [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 421,033

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United States, Health, Mental health, Sports

Id: Sdk7pLpbIls

Length: 21min 14sec (1274 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 02 2017