Parents don’t really know how to help. Some aren’t prepared for this new version of their high-achieving kid: doubting, sad, tired, confused—emotions they may have rarely dealt with in high school. And isn’t college supposed to be even better than high school? When your child is more mature, self-sufficient, and otherwise flourishing just as she always has been, except now at an even higher level?
The relatively early age—sometimes as early as elementary school—at which parents define children as athletes makes it more difficult to cultivate other parts of their identity. Very little else in our society is rewarded as athletics are. And when you’re young, the distinction between an activity that truly satisfies your soul and one that merely brings accolades is difficult to parse. For many, those two things aren’t mutually exclusive. For others, sports are actually not their passion, a realization that doesn’t come until they’re put into the fire of college sports. But admitting ambivalence of this kind can feel like considering filing for divorce the day after a wedding: everyone involved has already invested so much time and money. And hadn’t you convinced yourself you were truly in love?
Ryan was eventually found to have anemia, a diagnosis that took far too long to reach, and she immediately began taking iron. By track season, her times dramatically improved. But for those few months when her body was playing tricks on her mind, which led to her mind playing tricks on itself, she was nearly inconsolable, and it became clear how much self-worth we both had wrapped up in being high-achieving athletes.
Anemia has nothing on mental illness, although with both, people often assume you’re just weak and can’t push through. We have little sympathy for injuries that we can’t see and touch, for whatever is hurting that isn’t bloody or outwardly broken. But that’s where the comparison between the two ends, because with mental illness, unlike anemia, an official diagnosis usually doesn’t end the stigma. And to make matters worse, those with the least empathy are often teammates—peers.
In the spring of 2016, I spent a week at the University of Oregon talking to student-athletes. One evening, I spoke about mental health with the Student Athlete Advisory Committee, and the first question directed at me was, “How can we think differently as athletes, because from the first day we step on campus, we’re taught that champions never quit and perseverance is what makes greatness? I’m worried a teammate might be really hurting and all I see is weakness.”
No good answer exists for this question, which was the response I gave. I told this young woman that I could deliver the most beautiful monologue about compassion and understanding, but no young person has been compelled toward empathy just because someone implored them to be. I then shared my own personal experience: I was too harsh on teammates who, for example, had transferred (we labeled them “traitors”); only years later did I come to see that just because a situation was right for me didn’t mean that it was right for everyone, and sometimes making a life change is fundamentally necessary for another person. Achieving that kind of insight took almost a decade. And what good did it do those scorned teammates I no longer spoke to? Perhaps the only relevant advice I could offer the Oregon athletes was this: Recognize that empathy might be in short supply. Educate yourself about mental health. And consider the idea that not every struggling teammate is weak.
I had this discussion with student-athletes, but the sentiment could have applied to much of the campus population. According to pretty much every study conducted over the past five years, levels of empathy among college-age students is plummeting. The University of Michigan conducted a study in 2014 that found that college kids are 40 percent less empathetic than they were just twenty years before. Researchers at Michigan’s Institute for Social Research shared their thoughts on why: “The ease of having ‘friends’ online might make people more likely to just tune out when they don’t feel like responding to others’ problems, a behavior that could carry over offline. Add in the hypercompetitive atmosphere and inflated expectations of success, born of celebrity ‘reality shows,’ and you have a social environment that works against slowing down and listening to someone who needs a bit of sympathy.”
After I spoke at the University of Oregon, a young woman approached me and shared the following: “Thanks for talking about empathy. Hopefully my teammates were listening. Sometimes it seems like it’s hard for them to focus on anything other than winning. And so then anyone going through something that remotely compromises that pursuit, like I am right now, gets ostracized. I feel like they talk about me behind my back instead of trying to understand.”
When it comes to mental health among athletes, clinical diagnoses are rare. Truth is, it’s unusual for an athlete to be open and honest with a coach or trainer. I was lucky that I had connected with our team’s trainer before my anxiety struck. She knew me on a few different levels: as an athlete, as a student, as someone who enjoyed talking about books, as an eighteen-year-old kid from New York. On some level, I think I understood that even though I felt I was failing at one identity—athlete—she saw my value on other levels and would recognize that I was more than someone who just happened to put on a Colorado jersey. And I needed her to validate my other layers of self-worth, the kind independent of basketball, because I was not yet capable.
During those months at CU, I thought I was alone, the only student-athlete who couldn’t deal with the transition to college, couldn’t deal with the time commitment, the added pressure, the morphing of my sport from something I loved into something I loathed. Everyone was strong. I was weak. Everyone was succeeding. I was failing. Why would I think otherwise? All the signals I had ever received indicated that I was the lucky one. I was living a dream. Being a big-time college athlete? I should relish that—love every minute. So what was wrong with me?
Nothing, actually—turns out I was in good company. In 2014, the American College Health Association surveyed nearly twenty thousand student-athletes. Some 28 percent of female student-athletes and 21 percent of males reported feeling depressed, while 48 percent of female student-athletes and 31 percent of males reported feeling anxious. Approximately 14 percent said they had seriously considered suicide, with 6 percent saying they had attempted it.