Toronto Raptors All-Star DeMar DeRozan said Tuesday night he is proud his acknowledgement that he suffers from depression helped Cleveland Cavaliers forward Kevin Love open up about his own mental health issues.
In an essay published on The Players' Tribune on Tuesday, Love talked about suffering a panic attack during a game this season and how it led to him addressing his mental health.
"It made me feel, you know, pretty damn good, honestly," DeRozan said about Love's essay. "So it's cool to be able to help somebody."
"It made me feel, you know, pretty damn good, honestly. So it's cool to be able to help somebody." - @DeMar_DeRozan on Kevin Love's Players' Tribune article pic.twitter.com/wyvmoSOuAB — Toronto Raptors (@Raptors) March 7, 2018
DeRozan talked with the Toronto Star last week about his bouts with depression, saying they can often become overwhelming.
"It's one of them things that no matter how indestructible we look like we are, we're all human at the end of the day," DeRozan told The Star. "Sometimes ... it gets the best of you, where times everything in the whole world's on top of you."
Editor's Picks Love opens up on panic attack, mental health Cavaliers forward Kevin Love opened up about suffering a panic attack during a game this season -- and how it led to him addressing his mental health -- in an essay published on The Players' Tribune.
On Tuesday night, DeRozan, 28, said the response to the article has surprised him.
"The last week has been one of the most incredible things that I have witnessed, period," DeRozan said after scoring 25 points in the Raptors' 106-90 win over the visiting Atlanta Hawks. "Everything I got back from it was so positive."
Love, 29, said in his essay that DeRozan was part of his inspiration.
"Mental health is an invisible thing, but it touches all of us at some point or another," Love wrote. "It's part of life. Like DeMar said, 'You never know what that person is going through.'"
Love was taken to the hospital during a Nov. 5 loss to the Hawks with what he described at the time as stomach pain and shortness of breath. In his Players' Tribune essay, he acknowledged the symptoms were caused by a panic attack.
"It came out of nowhere," Love wrote. "It was real -- as real as a broken hand or a sprained ankle. Since that day, almost everything about the way I think about my mental health has changed."
Love's essay also got a positive response, drawing support from teammate LeBron James on Twitter.
You're even more powerful now than ever before @kevinlove!!! Salute and respect brother! ✊🏾💪🏾🙏🏾 https://t.co/6nL6WoZMCm — LeBron James (@KingJames) March 6, 2018
Love wrote that since the initial panic attack he has been seeing a therapist a few times per month.
Love has not played since breaking his hand Jan. 30. He said Friday that he was optimistic he would return to game action before the team's stated eight-week recovery timeline.
He ended his piece by encouraging anyone dealing with inner struggles to seek help.
"So if you're reading this and you're having a hard time, no matter how big or small it seems to you, I want to remind you that you're not weird or different for sharing what you're going through," Love wrote. "Just the opposite. It could be the most important thing you do. It was for me."
"It’s one of them things that no matter how indestructible we look like we are, we’re all human at the end of the day."
Those are the words of Raptors star DeMar DeRozan regarding the challenges of dealing with mental health issues. DeRozan opened up about his battles with depression to the Toronto Star's Doug Smith after sending out a surprisingly honest tweet last month.
This depression get the best of me... — DeMar DeRozan (@DeMar_DeRozan) February 17, 2018
"Now, at my age, I understand how many people go through it," DeRozan said. "Even if it’s just somebody can look at it like, ‘He goes through it and he’s still out there being successful and doing this,’ I’m OK with that."
DeRozan's refreshing candor opened the door for Cavs forward Kevin Love to address his own challenges. In a first-person piece shared by The Players' Tribune on Tuesday, Love details how he handled a sudden panic attack during a game against the Hawks on Nov. 5 and why his stance on mental health quickly changed following the incident.
"It was a wake-up call, that moment," Love said. "I’d thought the hardest part was over after I had the panic attack. It was the opposite. Now I was left wondering why it happened — and why I didn’t want to talk about it... This was new territory for me, and it was pretty confusing. But I was certain about one thing: I couldn’t bury what had happened and try to move forward. As much as part of me wanted to, I couldn’t allow myself to dismiss the panic attack and everything underneath it. I didn’t want to have to deal with everything sometime in the future, when it might be worse. I knew that much."
With help from the Cavs, Love found a therapist and learned to accept the fact that he needed help after years of believing opening up was a "form of weakness" that could derail his success. Love credited DeRozan with normalizing the conversation surrounding these types of issues and creating an opportunity for others to do the same.
"One of the reasons I wanted to write this comes from reading DeMar’s comments last week about depression," Love said. "I’ve played against DeMar for years, but I never could’ve guessed that he was struggling with anything. It really makes you think about how we are all walking around with experiences and struggles — all kinds of things — and we sometimes think we’re the only ones going through them. The reality is that we probably have a lot in common with what our friends and colleagues and neighbors are dealing with...
"Because just by sharing what he shared, DeMar probably helped some people — and maybe a lot more people than we know — feel like they aren’t crazy or weird to be struggling with depression. His comments helped take some power away from that stigma, and I think that’s where the hope is."
It's true. Simply confronting and talking about what you're feeling takes away the unnecessary shame all too often associated with these problems — and I know this from personal experience.
I have wrestled with depression throughout my life — probably more than half of my 27 years of existence if I'm being honest — with varying degrees of success. As a teenager, I couldn't understand why I suddenly didn't feel things as strongly as I did when I was just a kid running around without a care in the world.
For me, depression wasn't a switch that flipped my basic emotions from happy to sad. It turned everything off. I didn't feel joy or a sense of accomplishment in doing something well. I didn't laugh when I saw something funny. I didn't even feel frustration when I lost playing basketball or a video game. It was all a collective shrug. The sadness and anger came later from not understanding why I wasn't feeling anything.
I thought I was bringing down the mood of everyone around me. That's when I really went to a dark place and wondered if removing myself from the equation was the best solution. I understood why others got to the place where hurting themselves seemed like a good option. At least you feel something, even if it's just pain.
Behind the incredible support of my family, I realized I had a problem. I visited a doctor and learned my depression was caused by a chemical imbalance in my brain. I took medication and visited a therapist on a regular basis. I told myself, "You head to the hospital as quickly as possible if you break a bone, so it doesn't make sense not to treat this, right?" And Love is correct about sitting in that room — it's definitely "terrifying and awkward and hard." But the more you do it, the easier it becomes, one small step at a time.
The same goes for the conversation about mental health in society. As prominent NBA players, Love and DeRozan can reach millions of people instantly with their platforms. (Love's tweet sharing his story hit more than 20,000 retweets in a few hours.) If these professional athletes promote their situations as displays of strength instead of weakness, more young men may recognize there is nothing "soft" about expressing yourself. It takes incredible bravery.
My voice is not as loud as Love's or DeRozan's, but I'll gladly add it to the conversation if it means just one more person might hear the message. You don't have to put yourself on a national stage by reaching to everyone, but reaching out to someone is better than, as Love said, keeping those emotions "buried inside." You will only help yourself, and there's a good chance you will also help someone else along the way.
Kevin Love has gone public with his panic attack. (Brandon Dill/Associated Press)
You would think that Kevin Love, a 29-year-old in his 10th season of professional basketball, would have experienced everything imaginable in a basketball game. But accustomed though he may be to life in the NBA, an unexpected problem sneaked up on Love last fall. The Cleveland Cavaliers star suffered a debilitating panic attack during an early season game, an experience that helped convince him Americans must pay more heed to mental health issues.
“For 29 years, I thought mental health was someone else’s problem,” Love wrote this week in a candid Players’ Tribune essay. “I’ve realized I need to change that.”
He started that process with a vivid description of his own experience. During the third quarter of a Nov. 5 home game, Love suddenly felt like “everything was spinning, like my brain was trying to climb out of my head.” He described his heart racing, writing that “it was like my body was trying to say to me, You’re about to die.” He left the arena and headed straight for the Cleveland Clinic.
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The experience was sobering enough to prompt his essay. And his description comes at a time when a host of well-known athletes are urging increased awareness of mental health issues: DeMar DeRozan recently described his battle with depression, Olympic swimming champion Michael Phelps has been outspoken about the same struggle, and New York Giants wide receiver Brandon Marshall has called raising mental health awareness “the civil rights issue of our era.” Love has now added his voice to that chorus.
“I turned 29 in September and for pretty much 29 years of my life I have been protective about anything and everything in my inner life,” Love wrote in the essay. “I was comfortable talking about basketball — but that came natural. It was much harder to share personal stuff, and looking back now I know I could have really benefited from having someone to talk to over the years. But I didn’t share — not to my family, not to my best friends, not in public. Today, I’ve realized I need to change that. I want to share some of my thoughts about my panic attack and what’s happened since. If you’re suffering silently like I was, then you know how it can feel like nobody really gets it. Partly, I want to do it for me, but mostly, I want to do it because people don’t talk about mental health enough. And men and boys are probably the farthest behind.”
Talking about mental health was “a form of weakness” that he worried could hurt him in basketball or “make me seem weird or different,” Love wrote. He also told teammates a panic attack caused him to leave a later game in January, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, although that is not mentioned in the Players’ Tribune piece.
“Growing up, you figure out really quickly how a boy is supposed to act. You learn what it takes to ‘be a man.’ It’s like a playbook: Be strong. Don’t talk about your feelings. Get through it on your own. So for 29 years of my life, I followed that playbook. And look, I’m probably not telling you anything new here,” he wrote. “These values about men and toughness are so ordinary that they’re everywhere . . . and invisible at the same time, surrounding us like air or water. They’re a lot like depression or anxiety in that way.”
Love’s description of what happened to him is terrifyingly real to anyone who has had a panic attack. His heart raced, and he couldn’t catch his breath.
“The air felt thick and heavy,” he wrote. “My mouth was like chalk. I remember our assistant coach yelling something about a defensive set. I nodded, but I didn’t hear much of what he said. By that point, I was freaking out. When I got up to walk out of the huddle, I knew I couldn’t reenter the game — like, literally couldn’t do it physically.
“Coach [Tyrone] Lue came up to me. I think he could sense something was wrong. I blurted something like, ‘I’ll be right back,’ and I ran back to the locker room. I was running from room to room, like I was looking for something I couldn’t find. Really I was just hoping my heart would stop racing. It was like my body was trying to say to me, You’re about to die. I ended up on the floor in the training room, lying on my back, trying to get enough air to breathe.”
Although he worried that people would find out, he sought therapy and now meets with a counselor, he estimates, “a few times” a month.
“He had a sense that the NBA wasn’t the main reason I was there that day, which turned out to be refreshing,” Love wrote of the first session. “Instead, we talked about a range of non-basketball things, and I realized how many issues come from places that you may not realize until you really look into them. I think it’s easy to assume we know ourselves, but once you peel back the layers it’s amazing how much there is to still discover.”
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For Love, the death of his beloved grandmother was one long-unresolved issue. And DeRozan’s frank discussion of his depression helped him, too.
“I’ve played against DeMar for years, but I never could’ve guessed that he was struggling with anything. It really makes you think about how we are all walking around with experiences and struggles — all kinds of things — and we sometimes think we’re the only ones going through them,” Love wrote. “The reality is that we probably have a lot in common with what our friends and colleagues and neighbors are dealing with. So I’m not saying everyone should share all their deepest secrets — not everything should be public and it’s every person’s choice. But creating a better environment for talking about mental health … that’s where we need to get to.”
DeRozan was recently applauded for opening up about his own struggles, telling the Toronto Star how overwhelming depression can be for him.
“It’s one of them things that no matter how indestructible we look like we are, we’re all human at the end of the day,” he said. “We all got feelings . . . all of that. Sometimes . . . it gets the best of you, where . . . everything in the whole world’s on top of you.”
DeRozan received an outpouring of support on Twitter after writing Feb. 17, “This depression get[s] the best of me …”
“This is real stuff,” he told the Star. “We’re all human at the end of the day. That’s why I look at every person I encounter the same way. I don’t care who you are. You can be the smallest person off the street or you could be the biggest person in the world, I’m going to treat everybody the same, with respect. My mom always told me: Never make fun of anybody because you never know what that person is going through. Ever since I was a kid, I never did. I never did. I don’t care what shape, form, ethnicity, nothing. I treat everybody the same. You never know.”
Marshall went public with his 2011 diagnosis of borderline personality disorder and has called raising mental health awareness “my purpose on this planet.”
“It’s extremely important for us to have this conversation not just in sports, but in society,” he told USA Today. “It’s important for us to change the narrative.”
Phelps, meanwhile, has admitted that depression caused him to consider suicide at times.
“For the longest time, I thought asking for help was a sign of weakness because that’s kind of what society teaches us,” he said (via USA Today). “That’s especially true from an athlete’s perspective. If we ask for help, then we’re not this big macho athlete that people can look up to. Well, you know what? If someone wants to call me weak for asking for help, that’s their problem. Because I’m saving my own life.”
At least as far as one teammate is concerned, Love needn’t have worried about how his essay would be received.
“You’re even more powerful now than ever before,” LeBron James tweeted Tuesday morning. “Salute and respect, brother!”
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CLEVELAND — Suffering for years in silence, Kevin Love has opened up about his struggles with mental health. The Cavaliers forward writes in an essay for the Players' Tribune that he had a panic attack during a game this season and he has spent most of his life afraid to accept there was something wrong with him.
"For 29 years, I thought about mental health as someone else's problem," he said.
Love says he was stricken with anxiety Nov. 5 during a home game against the Atlanta Hawks. Love adds that he had been under family stress and hadn't been sleeping well. After briefly being winded while playing 15 minutes in the first half, he felt his heart racing and couldn't catch his breath during a timeout in the third quarter.
"It's hard to describe, but everything was spinning, like my brain was trying to climb out of my head," said Love, a five-time All-Star now sidelined after breaking his left hand last month.
"The air felt thick and heavy. My mouth was like chalk. I remember our assistant coach yelling something about a defensive set. I nodded, but I didn't hear much of what he said. By that point, I was freaking out."
Love was taken to the Cleveland Clinic, but tests didn't reveal anything abnormal. He returned to playing at a high level, but was puzzled by what happened and burdened about people finding out.
Although he did not mention it in his essay, titled "Everyone Is Going Through Something," Love left a Jan. 20 game against Oklahoma City under similar circumstances. He also missed the team's practice the following day. Those absences prompted the now infamous heated team meeting in which former teammate Isaiah Thomas and others questioned why Love had been excused.
The exchange led to tense days around the Cavs, who rebuilt their roster by trading Thomas and four other players before the deadline.
Love's father, Stan, also played in the NBA. Kevin Love says he always struggled with the stigma attached to an athlete who shows weakness.
"Growing up, you figure out really quickly how a boy is supposed to act," he said. "You learn what it takes to 'be a man.' It's like a playbook: Be strong. Don't talk about your feelings. Get through it on your own. So for 29 years of my life, I followed that playbook."
According to the American Psychological Association, around one out of every 75 people might experience panic disorder, for which the hallmark symptom is panic attacks. The disorder usually appears during the teens or early adulthood. While the exact causes are not known, there does seem to be a connection with major life transitions that are potentially stressful. Family history of panic disorder also makes someone more susceptible.
Signs of a panic attack include:
racing heartbeat
difficulty breathing, feeling as though you "can't get enough air"
terror that is almost paralyzing
dizziness, lightheadedness or nausea
trembling, sweating, shaking
choking, chest pains
hot flashes, or sudden chills
tingling in fingers or toes ("pins and needles")
fear that you're going to go crazy or are about to die
Most people find help with a combination of cognitive and behavioral therapies.
The Cavs encouraged Love to see a therapist and he gets counseling a few times a month when the team is at home.
Love said he drew courage to go public with his issues after Toronto All-Star DeMar DeRozan's recently acknowledged he has had bouts of depression. After playing against DeRozan for years, Love said he would have never guessed one of the game's best players was having problems similar to his own.
"The reality is that we probably have a lot in common with what our friends and colleagues and neighbors are dealing with," Love wrote. "So I'm not saying everyone should share all their deepest secrets — not everything should be public and it's every person's choice. But creating a better environment for talking about mental health . that's where we need to get to."
Love's revelations promoted praise from teammate LeBron James, who posted on Twitter: "You're even more powerful now than ever before @kevinlove!!! Salute and respect brother!"
You’re even more powerful now than ever before @kevinlove!!! Salute and respect brother! ✊🏾💪🏾🙏🏾 https://t.co/6nL6WoZMCm — LeBron James (@KingJames) March 6, 2018
Love ended his piece by encouraging anyone dealing with inner struggle to seek help.
"So if you're reading this and you're having a hard time, no matter how big or small it seems to you, I want to remind you that you're not weird or different for sharing what you're going through," he said. "Just the opposite. It could be the most important thing you do. It was for me."
A few hours after the story was published, Love followed up with a tweet expressing thanks for the way his news had been received.
"Wow...I can't even describe how grateful I am for the love and support. More than anything, it's been amazing to see YOU tell your own stories about Mental Health. Let's keep it going," he wrote.
