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By Jayne Appel-Marinelli, retired WNBA player

An excerpt:
From the outside, we looked like a perfect, well-oiled machine. We were the family that people hoped to have.

Until the cops came.

That was the first time I realized something wasn’t quite so normal.

My coach pulled up to our house. Three police cars were sitting in the driveway.

“I’ll just take you to your neighbor’s house and you can hang out there until your parents can get you,” he said.

I didn’t know what was going on. Usually the police only come when something is wrong and you need help — that’s when you call them. Clearly, my parents needed help. I didn’t ask much, either. My friends and teammates were seeing all of this right beside me. They didn’t have cops at their houses. I was confused, but I was also embarrassed.

I went to my neighbor’s house and waited. After a few hours, my mom came to get me.

“What happened?” I asked.

“There was just a situation with one of your family members and we called for help,” she said.

She didn’t say much more than that, and as a family, we didn’t really address it. I figured it was a one-time thing.

But the episodes continued. The police came again. And again. They were at my house pretty often.

I didn’t know what was going on. Usually the police only come when something is wrong and you need help — that’s when you call them. Clearly, my parents needed help.

“Go upstairs,” my mom instructed us each time. And each time, my brothers and I went to our parents’ bedroom. We chose that room because there was a bathroom attached to it. We were going to be there for a while.

We could always hear yelling, but there were different voices. Sometimes it was the police or a neighbor, sometimes family, and other times, we weren’t sure. We never really knew what was actually happening downstairs. I’d turn the TV on and put the volume up to drown out the screams. They were panic-filled and terrified and angry. I didn’t want to hear any of it — probably for the same reason our mother sent us upstairs: protection. Not from danger but from the image we might have of our family member if we saw or heard too much.

There were about 10 episodes of that scale, but they weren’t predictable. Sometimes we would go six months without one, and sometimes there would be two in one month. The behavior of our family member developed slowly but consistently over time, becoming more prevalent throughout the years. At first, doctors explored different mood disorders and the diagnosis was bipolar. But with each mental psychotic breakdown, we weren’t sure.

It was a long process to reach a diagnosis. It can take years, generally, but we had to find the right doctors — medical and psychiatric — and the right medications, especially if they had side effects. It’s not like you can give a mentally ill patient a drug and ask them, “How do you feel?” A fully functioning person could answer that question with ease. If I broke my leg and was given medication, and asked, “Did this drug help the pain?” I could answer, “Yes, I feel better.”

Read the rest of Jayne’s story.

For more information on Jayne Appel-Marinelli’s mental health advocacy, and information on mental illness, visit www.bringchange2mind.org.

Read the original story on The Huffington Post

By Maddie Crum

4,990. That’s roughly how many hours any given Olympic hopeful spent training between the London Games and now, hurdling, sprinting or vaulting toward her goals, flicking beads of sweat out of her line of vision. Practice can mean maintaining a strong, sculpted physique, like polishing a stone. It can mean perfecting a technique that must be judged favorably to secure victory, or using that technique as a foundation for speed and efficiency.

That number ― 4,990 ― is what you get when you multiply two two-hour training sessions by six days each week by 52 weeks each year for four years, including religious and personal holidays. It does not include the time devoted to commuting, cooking and otherwise maintaining impeccable physical health, or the time spent maintaining anything else: relationships with family and friends, academic pursuits, personal finances. Feeding a cat, fixing a car. The tasks and duties, big and small, that make up a life. For those who compete in particularly time-consuming sports ― like Michael Phelps, who logs six hours of swimming and weightlifting each day, six days each week ― the count is even higher.

Collectively, these hours spent on a single pursuit are voluminous enough to envelop an identity whole. It’s why we praise athletes for their work ethic and tenacity; they look like our own aspirational visions of goal-achievement, but with a hyper-focus that’s hard to relate to firsthand. For most of us, such myopia is discouraged. Balance and moderation, we’re told, are integral to happiness. When you give that much of yourself over to something, something else has to give way.

Scott Goldman, a sports psychologist at the University of Michigan, explains the commitment plainly: “The amount of time, effort and energy an athlete puts into their sport exceeds almost anything else they’ve ever done in their life.” So, if you were a swimmer, “you probably spent more hours swimming than you did learning how to drive. You probably spent more hours in the pool than you did with, say, your boyfriend.”

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