More athletes are opening up about their struggles with mental health, even at home. But what makes them vulnerable in the first place, and how should the ecosystem step up?
Around the time, in 2011, he was being signed up by Indian Premier League (IPL) franchise Pune Warriors India for a whopping Rs 10 crore, cricketer Robin Uthappa would spend days curled up in bed, willing the world to shut him out. In three months, he changed his phone number so often that his friends and peers couldn’t keep up. “I lost touch with everyone in the cricketing fraternity,” he says. On really bad days, he would open his balcony door, mark a run-up and tell himself he would jump off on the count of three. “I’d count up to two and then something in me would say ‘wait’,” he adds. “It didn’t matter how much I was earning. It did nothing to alleviate the pits of depression I was in.”
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