Bailey Houlihan - University of Memphis Volleyball

Mental health within athletes has always had a certain stigma with it never to be talked about. Others look at us as these tough robot-like human beings where we show no emotion and play our sport. As much as we sometimes look like robots playing our sport, we are indeed human beings. Emotional human beings.

I started playing sports at the age of three and haven’t stopped since. When I first started playing competitive sports at the age of five, depression and anxiety weren’t even a thought on my mind because I was just a kid. As I grew and tried new sports, that became more relevant to my game play along with my mental health overall.

These thoughts rose during my junior year of high school and continued for some time after that. There were two key moments that changed my mental health. In February of 2019, my teammate suddenly passed away from getting hit by a car where the driver was under the influence of drugs. And then in the year 2020 in January, my friend attempted suicide. Suicide is a heavy subject and very hard to talk about, let alone process when someone so close to you has just gone through something that will affect their life forever. These were back-to-back years of “what do I do?”. There were so many emotions with depression and anxiety and that got in the way of my daily tasks and how to manage the pain that I was hiding.

Trying to look at the positive, I was finally going to play Division 1 volleyball at the University of Memphis in the year 2020. Within all the excitement, COVID hit my first year of college. Our schedule was to do school online, play volleyball with masks on and then stay in our rooms and isolate from everyone; not a very fun freshman year I would say. This is when I knew I really needed help, so I went through the school to get a therapist through the counseling center. I have loved every second of it and still go once a month.

Speaking out against the athlete mental health stigma will help those around you with seeing that people can go through the same thing you are with mental health. You see on the news these larger-than-life athletes such as Michael Phelps and Simone Biles open about their mental health, and it gives hope to those who are hiding their emotions. The amount of gold medals at the end of the day won’t change the fact that they are just people with emotions. They are human beings, not robots.

We are all capable of making a change to this society of making mental health a common topic to talk about instead of something scary we don’t want to bring up.

“Vulnerability sounds like truth and feels like courage. Truth and courage aren’t always comfortable, but they’re never weaknesses”- Brene Brown