Los Angeles Chargers starting right tackle Joe Barksdale was profiled by the Los Angles Times. He discussed his battles with severe depression, his therapy and how he hopes to be an advocate for people suffering from chronic depression.

By Dan Woike

The thoughts Joe Barksdale had wrestled with for as long as he could remember started to get louder.

“Just kill yourself. Just do it. What’s the point of living if you’re going to be this miserable the rest of your life? Just kill yourself.”

It was early November 2017 and Barksdale, the Chargers’ starting right tackle, sat in the team’s training room. He’d just found out he wouldn’t be playing in an upcoming game against Jacksonville after injuring his foot during a fight with a teammate.

“If I could save another person, maybe that’s why the attempts [to harm himself] didn’t work,” — Joe Barksdale

He’d missed the previous two games with a toe injury that had been bothering him for more than a month. Now, he was going to be out again.

He cried.

His severe depression — something Barksdale calls the “monkey” always on his back — had gotten the best of him. Truth didn’t matter anymore. Only sadness did.

He got home and sharpened a knife, his mind racing. His wife, Brionna, convinced him to put it down. They talked, he calmed, and the crisis was averted.

Barksdale, who is on medication and in therapy, is sharing his story in the hopes of becoming an advocate for people suffering from chronic depression.

“If I could save another person, maybe that’s why the attempts [to harm himself] didn’t work,” he said.

During a wide-ranging interview with The Times, Barksdale, 29, said he was physically, emotionally and sexually abused as a child.

He hesitated to talk about the abuse at first before deciding to share his experience. “I was molested when I was younger,” he said. “It happened.”

It was the beginning of childhood filled with insecurities and anxieties.

He felt like a burden because of his size. He was expensive to clothe and feed. He was more interested in engineering than he was in sports. Older kids in inner-city Detroit picked on him.

“Everything that’s happened to me going forward has just piled onto it,” he said. “It’s not going away. They’re like tattoos.”

As he continued to fight a sadness he knew would stay with him, Barksdale found one way to feel better.

Less than four years after learning how to play guitar — at former coach Jeff Fisher’s suggestion — Barksdale just released his debut album, “Butterflies, Rainbows & Moonbeams.”

“If he was stressed out, where some people might go and smoke a cigarette or something, he’d go and pick up his guitar,” Brionna said. “His guitar was his outlet, and once he started writing music it was even better because he could get those thoughts and feelings out in words and music.”

Brionna wrote the lyrics to the most personal song on the album, “Journey to Nowhere,” after a tough night for Barksdale due to his depression.

Read the rest of the story on LATimes.com.

Below is an excerpt of Corey Hirsch’s follow up story on The Players’ Tribune as he writes to all those who suffer from mental illness.

By Corey Hirsch, Retired Professional Hockey Player

Honestly, I was prepared to never work in hockey again. When I went public with my story about struggling with obsessive-compulsive disorder and depression last year, I was terrified that people wouldn’t understand. I was worried that no one would want to hire me ever again, and that doors would close on me — and maybe worst of all, that people in the hockey community would look at me like I was damaged goods, that I would never work in hockey again.

I mean, I wrote about trying to kill myself. I wrote about struggling daily with dark thoughts that wouldn’t go away no matter what I did. I wrote about feeling weak and confused and sad, which is something that hockey players of my generation — and honestly, anyone of my generation — were told was for “crazy people.” In my day, you simply did not talk about mental health. Ever.

So before I published my story, I honestly was prepared for the worst. But I shared it with my family and with my kids, and they gave me their blessing and support. I was tired of holding everything inside. I wanted people to know the real me and why I was like that when I was younger. After the story went out into the world, well … my fears couldn’t have been further from reality. I was absolutely blown away by how many people reached out to me through text and email and Twitter to say that they’d struggled with similar thoughts and feelings for years — sometimes decades — and either they didn’t know what was wrong with them, or they were afraid to talk to someone about it.

Well, I’m not alone. We’re not alone. Mental health awareness is an enormous, unspoken problem — not just in hockey in Canada and the United States, and not just in sports in general, but also across all other spectrums of society.

Almost one in five … think about that. About twenty percent of the adult population suffers from mental illness, and just because you are a professional athlete or a doctor or a lawyer does not grant you immunity. Anyone at anytime can suffer from a mental health issue and it can strike at any time.

There’s nothing to be embarrassed or ashamed about. We’re all just trying to get through the day. So let’s be open. Let’s talk about it.

In the past year I’ve been at golf tournaments and other events, and 40- and 50-year-old men have walked up to me right out of the blue, with tears in their eyes, and said, “Thank you. You gave me a voice. I went through it, too. Sometimes I still go through it.”

They don’t want me to fix them. They don’t want me to cure them. They know I’m not qualified to do that. They just want me to listen.

I spent years trapped in a cycle of shame and disgust and depression — not telling a single soul what was really going on with me — before I finally reached out and was properly diagnosed with true OCD. It was like the weight of the world fell from my shoulders. I wasn’t cured. But I finally knew what was causing all of my relentless thoughts.

Read the rest of the Corey Hirsch’s story on The Players’ Tribune.

Below is an excerpt of CNN’s story about Michael Phelps as he opens up on his battle with depression and suicidal thoughts.

By Susan Scutti, CNN

The ‘easy’ part

Asked what it takes to become a champion, Phelps, 32, immediately replied, “I think that part is pretty easy — it’s hard work, dedication, not giving up.”

Pressed for more details, the Baltimore native described the moment his coach told his parents he could become an Olympian and he recalled the taste of defeat when losing a race by “less than half a second” at his first Olympics in Sydney in 2000, which meant returning home without a medal.

“I wanted to come home with hardware,” said Phelps, acknowledging this feeling helped him break his first world record at age 15 and later win his first gold medal at the Athens Olympic Games in 2004.

“I was always hungry, hungry, and I wanted more,” said Phelps. “I wanted to push myself really to see what my max was.”

Intensity has a price.

“Really, after every Olympics I think I fell into a major state of depression,” said Phelps when asked to pinpoint when his trouble began. He noticed a pattern of emotion “that just wasn’t right” at “a certain time during every year,” around the beginning of October or November, he said. “I would say ’04 was probably the first depression spell I went through.”

That was the same year that Phelps was charged with driving under the influence, Axelrod reminded the spellbound audience.

Read the rest of the Michael Phelps’ story on CNN.