Danny Rose has been open in tackling his demons and that can only be a good thing in the wider worldDanny Rose remembered getting angry. He’d suffered his first really serious injury and the team were doing well without him. “I didn’t socialise, I wasn’t sleeping, I was looking to fall out with anybody.” Gareth Southgate and the Duke of Cambridge were among the small audience listening intently as the Tottenham left-back described the signs of his depression. Related: Elite sport is gradually waking up to widespread mental health issues | Sean Ingle Related: ‘They’ve just scratched the surface’ – football tackling mental health but more can be done Continue reading...
The Olympic legend’s mental health battle is a reminder of the darkness that can descend when a sporting great’s career endsThere were no tears when Victoria Pendleton won her first Olympic gold medal. There was no great emotional climax, no comforting sense, in the aftermath, that her life was now complete. She did not even really feel like celebrating. “It’s like a big anticlimax anyway,” she confided a year later. “I mean, how could you achieve your dream? You don’t plan for the next day. In the morning it’s like it never happened, like you’re reading about it in a comic book. When you’re in that adrenaline-fuelled environment you take in so little … so it’s not easy for it...
At times it is hard to read Unspoken, the new book written with Gary Speed’s widow. But at least more of those in the game struggling with depression now feel able to come forwardIt is the family stuff, the detail that would usually remain private, that provides some of the toughest passages from the newly released book Unspoken, in which the people who knew Gary Speed the best try to make sense out of a tragedy none of them will ever properly understand.The story, for example, his widow, Louise, tells of the long, unimaginable battle to start functioning again and the shattering effects of what she describes, more than once, as being put on the scene of a horror film....