‘I’m trying to raise hope’: how one rugby coach found light amid depression | Andy Bull

Paul Pook, one of the 225 former players involved in the legal case against the game’s authorities, on the diagnosis that has changed his life

“We hear the term ‘functioning alcoholic’,” Paul Pook says, “well, sometimes I think of myself as a functioning suicidalist.” He apologises for the comparison, says he isn’t sure whether it’s inappropriate, only he can’t think of a better way of explaining it. Pook has spent the past 20 years working as a high‑performance coach, for the Irish rugby union team, the Russian Olympic Committee and the Australian Institute of Sport. He has helped athletes to win grand slams and gold medals. And all the time, he had these thoughts. The doctors call it “suicidal ideation”.

Pook describes being on a flight from Moscow when the plane hit turbulence. “And I’m thinking: ‘This could be it, the plane is going to crash and I wouldn’t feel this pain any more.’” He is bipolar, and he talks about the illness in terms of a sliding scale “where one is suicidal, five is normal, and 10 is psychotic. I’ve been at one five times in my life, I spent a lot of time around three, and maybe once I was up at eight or nine.”