While elite athletes train themselves to push their bodies toward extremes, they’re also pushing their minds to sometimes unhealthy – and even dangerous – extremes, as well. That's something wrestler Helen Maroulis found out the hard way when she was diagnosed with PTSD. Now she and Olympians like Simone Biles and Michael Phelps are changing the conversation surrounding mental health. Hosted by Molly Bloom. Produced by FilmNation Entertainment in association with Gilded Audio.
While elite athletes train themselves to push their bodies toward extremes, they’re also pushing their minds to sometimes unhealthy – and even dangerous – extremes, as well. That's something wrestler Helen Maroulis found out the hard way when she was diagnosed with PTSD. Now she and Olympians like Simone Biles and Michael Phelps are changing the conversation surrounding mental health. Hosted by Molly Bloom. Produced by FilmNation Entertainment in association with Gilded Audio.
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Molly: At the 2016 Olympics in Rio, American freestyle wrestler Helen Maroulis faced off against Japan’s Saori Yoshida.
Helen was a first time Olympian. Yoshida was a legend — the most decorated athlete in her sport.
With a gold medal on the line, it was a huge mismatch. On paper, at least.
Announcer [1:30]: For the first time in over four years, Yoshida is beaten. And Helen Maroulis of the United States has created a big upset on the mat. An unbelievable win over one of the greatest wrestlers of all time!
Helen’s win over the Olympic icon was an incredible moment —- the greatest upset at those Summer Games. But it wasn’t a fluke.
The following year, Helen won the World Championship. She did it without losing a single point. She was unstoppable.
At the time, no athlete in the world was
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dominating their sport like Helen Maroulis was dominating freestyle wrestling.
And it’s from that incredible high that Helen was about to hit an unimaginable low.
Helen’s spiral began in early 2018. She was competing in an event in India.
Helen: I got hit in between the eyes in the first match. I thought maybe I was sick or jet lag or maybe I was just tired.
And then after the third match, I knew something was really not right.
Helen consulted with two doctors. One advised her to rest. The other said she could continue to compete.
Helen wrestled on.
The signs that something was off continued. For starters, she was suddenly so sensitive to sounds that she started hiding inside bathrooms before matches. She even plugged cotton balls in her ears to shield herself from noise.
Eventually, Helen was diagnosed with a concussion.
After a few months, she was cleared to resume training. But then she was hit with another concussion during a particularly grueling training session
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with a particularly aggressive coach. After another few months of recovery, Helen was cleared to train.
She was feeling like herself again. Physically, that is.
Mentally? That was a very different story.
Helen: I was working with a strength coach and I started having these like breakdowns. We'd be in the middle of a lift. And then whenever I was straining to lift a weight, the second I would finish, put the weight down, I would start crying, like burst out crying. Like someone died. But I didn't feel any emotion attached to it.
I'm like, What is … I was, I was like, Oh my gosh, I'm so sorry. I'm so embarrassed. I don't know why I'm crying.
Her toughness — her mental invincibility — was what made her an Olympic gold medalist.
But after her concussions, she wasn’t feeling very tough at all.
Helen: Two years ago, I’m at the top of the podium and I feel like I've been able to surpass all these limitations that I always thought I had in my human body. And then two years later, I feel like I've just completely, like, my body has just failed me.
I had to step out of being an athlete and thinking that I can like work
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through it and fight through it. And just literally say, I'm a broken human.
What was so scary was that it was her mind that was broken.
Helen: It's almost like your brain's a battery, right?
You're wondering, am I depressed because I don't get to do my sport or am I depressed, because this is my brain. Like, this is the way that my brain is reacting right now from the concussion.
When I kind of got down into that 10% battery range, I would start hearing voices in my head to hurt myself.
Helen was terrified to tell others just how dark of a place she was in. The only way out was to do the hardest thing for an Olympian. She had to admit to herself —- and to everyone around her —- that while she’s an athlete capable of superhuman feats, she is … at the end of the day… still human.
Molly: I’m Molly Bloom,
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and this is TORCHED, a show about the heat of competition: and what the greatest athletes would lose… to win.
This season is about controversies and scandals on the biggest world stage: the Olympics.
Today’s episode is about the mental challenges that athletes face. While elite athletes train themselves to push their bodies toward extremes, they’re also pushing their minds to sometimes unhealthy – and even dangerous – extremes, as well .
That has come with a cost that we’re only now beginning to understand.
Because of a stigma against talking about psychological pain, mental health in sports is a serious issue that’s been overlooked and ignored. But recently, more and more athletes have been opening up, sharing stories of struggle and perseverance in an effort to finally change the conversation about mental health and address this urgent crisis.
In this episode, we’ll try to understand why so many athletes face
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mental health issues, including the most decorated Olympians, from Michael Phelps to Simone Biles. But let’s start with the story of an Olympic gold medalist and three-time world champion whose mental health journey led her to shatter everything that she always believed made her a champion in the first place.
Molly: So when you were a little kid, what did you think about Olympic athletes?
Helen: Oh my gosh, I loved Olympic athletes. That was the pinnacle for me. I thought they were superheroes.
Helen Maroulis was a shy kid growing up in the suburbs of Maryland, but she wasn’t shy about her dreams. She wanted to be a superhero. She wanted to be atop the podium at the Olympics.
Helen: Any Olympic sport when it would come on, when the Olympics would come on — Winter, Summer games— I would just sit in front of the TV and watch. The Olympic spirit, everything is just magical.
Helen’s journey to the Olympics was far from conventional. She first got into wrestling when she was seven years old:
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her younger brother needed a sparring partner. Helen took the mat wearing pink ankle socks.
Immediately, she excelled as a wrestler. She was hooked.
When she was eight, women’s wrestling became an Olympic sport. But it was still male dominated.
Helen: When I was 12 years old or 13, there was this wrestling club that had a really renowned coach in the Maryland area. And I really wanted to work with him. And he originally told my mom, No. And then saw me wrestle at a tournament and said, Okay, she can come up and practice with us. And, I remember the first practice. You know, nobody wants to go with the girl and all the guys are scrambling to get a partner and have it not be you.
I didn't have a partner and I went up to the coach and I said, Hey, I don't have a partner. And he basically said like, Tough shit, like find somebody or you're out.
Helen didn’t just will herself onto that team of boys. As a teenager, she was beating most of the boys. To fit into a macho, manly culture, she had to present herself as tough enough, even if she had her
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doubts about whether she fit in.
Helen: The sport of wrestling and the community and the culture, prides itself so much on like toughness and work ethic to the point where I felt that I just never knew if I was those things.
Helen: Sometimes I would look around and just feel like everybody was tougher except for me, or everyone was more skilled except for me. I just struggled with almost being like my own cheerleader or being my own support system, being able to say like, Hey, it's okay, you did enough today.
So I think growing up, I just always felt like if I'm very strict with myself and if I have high standards and if it's never good enough, then that will push me to be great.
Helen pushed herself to be a college champion and then all the way to the Olympics in Rio.
Molly: So in 2016 you became the first American to win gold in women's freestyle wrestling.
Helen: Yeah.
Molly: I mean, that is incredible. What was going through your head during the competition?
Helen: It was a dream come true. I don't think I'll ever have the words. It felt like blinders came off the second the buzzer rang and I thought back to like
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me as a little girl and I just couldn't believe like, Wow, this person won. It was really, it was really emotional.
Helen was an inspiration not just in the U.S., but also in Greece, her father’s home country. The Greek government even honored her by putting her image on a postage stamp. With her tightly braided hair and statuesque body, she’s like a Greek goddess come to life.
To girls around the world, Helen now represented what she aspired to be growing up.
A superhero.
But Helen didn’t actually feel invincible. She often felt vulnerable, even if she didn’t show it.
Helen: For the longest time, it's been a struggle for me to figure out, like, where do I stand on the spectrum of things for defining myself as an athlete.
Like, when my back's up against the wall and something goes wrong and I get injured right before major competition, it's like, I can just snap into a mode where I don't care what happens. We're finding a way to get it done, but then there's this other part of me that's very emotional and can't cut out that emotional piece.
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After her injury in India in 2018, she began to feel those emotions flood out —- emotions she couldn’t control.
She just felt incredibly sensitive to everything around her. Everyday noises, like the buzz of her air conditioner or people singing at church, were suddenly unbearable.
Specialists advised Helen to start wearing noise-canceling headphones and vision-correction glasses. She started a gluten free diet.
Helen spent three months recovering. And then she returned to competition —- looking back, it was just too soon.
Because not long after returning, Helen had another concussion.
Helen: When I was healed and ready, I went back and competed in New York. That's where I was living at the time and was working with my coach again. And he took me to train with his buddy.
This guy just like, hit me over the head for 45 minutes straight. And I first, I was just like shocked and confused and, um, I like literally was blindsided. I'm like,
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wait, is this just his style of wrestling? Does he not know how to wrestle a woman? Does he not realize he's being abrasive?
And just that again, that like trained response in me. Right? Like if you're in this sport, you can't train yourself to cower any time. Something kind of gets hard. So I was just trained, like, no, I'm gonna, you know, I'm going to show you and I'm going to get this back. And like, you know, I'm going to defend myself.
Helen did what she was trained to do: power through.
Helen: My dad was like, why didn’t you stop this practice? And I said dad, it's, you don't understand like the things that made me me, this is the same thing that was like, I'm not going to stop no matter what, if this guy is trying to hurt me, if this coach doesn't want me here, like all those things that helped me to get the gold medal and get to where I am, have backfired now in this new situation.
Helen: The next day I rolled up out of bed and I had like vertigo, like I couldn't even stand up. I had to like crawl to the bathroom.
I went to the hospital and basically that jump started another three month recovery getting another concussion just from this training practice
Most alarming during those three months was that Helen was feeling her personality change.
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She would suddenly burst out crying unexpectedly, in the gym or even watching a movie. But she was, at the same time, oddly … detached.
Helen: My personality completely changed where I was normally very emotional and sensitive. I was completely cold and logical and stoic. Like I couldn't, I literally could not feel emotions.
Helen: When I went back to California and started working with a specialist, he's like, I can guarantee you that your vestibular, which is like your balance, your eye speed, your ability to track your focus, the headaches, like the light sensitivity sound sensitivity. Like I can guarantee that all that's going to go away.
You'll be fine with that. And he said, but I can't guarantee your personality will ever come back. And that was kind of really scary.
When Helen had an uncontrollable outburst of emotions while lifting weights, a colleague came up to her. The man had done tours in Afghanistan and told Helen that she was displaying signs of post traumatic stress disorder.
Helen met with a sports psychologist who gave
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her the official diagnosis of PTSD.
Molly: Were you aware that elite athletes are often diagnosed with PTSD?
Helen: I was not, I was not, I didn't.
I was very embarrassed about the PTSD. I didn't speak about it.
I never wanted any athlete or competitor to know about, know about it. I didn't, I felt so ashamed. Like no soldiers get PTSD and who are you? And I just always had this thought, like, I would think of like the toughest, you know, my toughest teammate and one of my closest friends. And I'm like, she was in my position.
This would have never happened to her. Like, she'd never get PTSD. Like, what is wrong with me? Why, why am I. Why am I so weak, weak minded and all these things?
Helen didn’t talk to others about what she was going through, but she did seek help and went to a treatment center specializing in trauma. As part of her therapy, Helen talked about the traumatic experiences that led to her brain injuries and PTSD. She opened up about her shame. That’s when she learned something that completely changed her perspective.
Helen: I was talking to one of the doctors at the training center and I was just crying to
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her and I said, Oh my gosh, I must be the worst case you've ever seen. Like who do you know, that went and won a gold medal, and then this, this is like, what happened to them?
They just failed, you know, so badly at life. And she said, You would be surprised how many athletes have mental health issues.
And when she had worked with one particular sport, she said that her and she and the other doctors went through the entire list of the top 400 athletes. And they could only find two people that they did not have a mental health issue.
I remember my response when she told me that. I said, Why aren't we talking about this? Like, I would just love to have known this or to hear this because I just feel like I'm the screw up.
Helen had top specialists help her deal with her PTSD, which got her on the road to recovery. But the most important breakthrough in her recovery came with this simple revelation: that she wasn’t the only Olympic superhero struggling in secret. Far from it.
CBS THIS MORNING MICHAEL PHELPS
Norah O’Donnell: [3:00] In August you
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tweeted, the world knows me as a 28-time medalist, but for me sometimes my greatest accomplishment is getting out of bed in the morning. That’s incredible to hear.
Michael Phelps: I spent three or four days in my room in 2014 not wanting to be alive. Ever since the Olympics, I’ve gone through one, maybe two, major depression spells. It’s not something that’s going to go away.
In 2018 — not long after Helen started going through her struggles with PTSD — retired swimmer Michael Phelps courageously revealed on CBS This Morning that his depression had been so severe he had contemplated suicide.
To hear the most decorated Olympian ever admit that he had struggled with depression was stunning – not only to fans who’d watched him dominate at the Olympics, but also to fellow Olympians learning that they weren’t alone in their struggles.
Julie: He's a perfect example of what an Olympian
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can be if they so choose to speak out about this. Olympians just like anybody else don't owe us anything regarding their mental health, but it can be such a huge help when they choose to open up about this.
That’s Julie Kliegman. She’s an editor and reporter at Sports Illustrated, and she focuses on mental health and sports.
Julie: Elite athletes face the same mental health issues that the rest of us do. They range from anxiety and depression as some of the more common conditions to eating disorders, substance use, OCD, PTSD. But they're facing these issues in a more public way, on a very big stage.
They’re held on these pedestals.
Through Julie’s reporting on the issue in recent years, she’s found evidence that because they are held on those pedestals, elite athletes like Phelps, and Helen, are actually more likely to struggle with mental health.
Julie: - I think it’s not necessarily that athletes are predisposed to these conditions, it’s just that they’re
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also fighting stereotypes and this pressure that normal people don’t necessarily have. They have this pressure to be tough, to be perfect, even.
Last year, Julie spoke to former sprinter Lolo Jones, who was one of Team USA’s biggest stars entering the 2008 Summer Games. Lolo was expected to win Gold.
Julie: She tripped on the penultimate hurdle. She was winning by a metaphorical mile. And she ended up finishing off the podium and sort of crumpled down to the track and started crying. She was mocked and teased and the moment was very crushing for her; journalists were not too kind to her. Most of the public was not either.
Lolo was graceful after her loss —- she told reporters that she wasn’t meant to win Gold that day. But more than a decade later, Lolo revealed that the moment haunted her virtually every day of her life afterwards. She simply could not get over the moment. She opened up to
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Julie, telling her that she kept reliving the moment over and over—- in her sleep, while washing dishes, while at the grocery store, where strangers would come up to her.
Julie: It got to the point where she’d be driving down the highway and hoping a truck would hit her or something. Passive, suicidal thoughts —- she didn’t necessarily have a plan to kill herself, but she wouldn’t have minded if it happened either.
Lolo was eventually diagnosed with PTSD. She was shocked by the news. She had no idea that athletes could suffer from this kind of trauma —- like Helen, she thought it only affected soldiers.
We tried reaching out to her for this episode, but she was unavailable for an interview.
Julie: PTSD is not one of the more normalized conditions to discuss, especially because like Lolo, a lot of people don’t even necessarily realize they have it or it’s something that could happen to them.
Lolo had told me as much that she thought, as well, because it can
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be really daunting to find specialists on your own. So even having a network available, having that first point of contact is half the struggle for a lot of people.
Olympians have long had access to top surgeons, and physical therapists to keep them in peak physical condition. They’ve long had sports psychologists to get the very best out of them, in competition . But it was always about staying strong within the sport. Staying psychologically strong outside of it? That wasn’t a priority. In fact, revealing mental struggles could backfire for an athlete in any sport.
Julie: In a worst case scenario, when an athlete opens up about their mental health, I mean, their coach will tell them they're being ridiculous. Their coach will tell them they’re weak, executives on their team will try to trade them, will consider them a lost cause basically. In a worst case scenario, their teammates would shun them instead of having their back. It's really scary. And in a worst case scenario, also, you have to remember that their family and friends may not be supportive
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either.
So they might be left alone on this island, especially if they haven't sought out care yet. Especially if they're at the beginning of this road on dealing with their mental health.
So they have a lot to risk by coming forward.
The fear of being left alone on the island is something Helen can relate to.
Helen: Growing up in a male dominated sport, for me, it was just ingrained in me to, I guess, be such a people pleaser in the sense that like, if I upset the coach, like he's not going to work with me anymore.
Everything like is about making sure that there are peace so that I can stay on the team and continue. And I think that mindset really kinda carried over into, into adulthood.
After the concussions, like for coaches, no, you better explain to me the scientific reason for everything we're doing and that better not be about mentally tough because I'm not putting up with that. Like I don't have to prove myself anymore.
Molly: I think that's a part of growing up for all of us, even outside of athletics, too. Be able to find your voice and, and not
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worry that using it will deliver some sort of insurmountable consequences.
Helen: Yeah. I see this so much now, the more that I will talk to other athletes, it's like, well, why did you, why did you choose to go to this tournament? And, the coach wants me to have their coach made me, but I really didn't feel like I should, or I didn't feel [00:55:00] that this was the best thing for me.
At the end of the day, it's like, what's the purpose of sport? It's to help us to be our best selves in society. And so it's not just about answering to what someone says we should do.
Helen: I feel like there’s been a shift. I think that’s also rearranging the power dynamic too. For the longest time, athletes, were putting ourselves on this conveyor belt to just churn out these results. And I think to see ourselves as a totally whole complete person is the best approach.
The shift began with Michael Phelps coming forward in 2018, but that just started the conversation.
In 2020, the dialogue heated up even more.
TOKYO 2020 OLYMPIC GAMES POSTPONEMENT
[0:03] We are breaking into programming here because in the last few
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minutes, Japanese Prime Minister Shinjo Abe now says he’s asked the IOC for a one-year postponement for the Tokyo Olympics
When the global pandemic hit, the Olympics were delayed. Leaving Olympians to reassess their priorities, just like everyone else.
Jess: Mental health worsened pretty significantly during COVID.
Folks were isolated, maybe anxious, uncertain, so a lot of those things would come up around mental health. We also know that folks weren't sleeping well. And so I think athletes had all of those same things.
A lot of athletes were making decisions. Do I want to do this anymore?
That’s Dr. Jess Bartley, the director of mental health services for the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee. Jessica began her role in 2020, as the pandemic raised awareness about mental health and prompted the USOPC to be more proactive in dealing with the issue.
The first step was making a simple addition to the USOPC mission statement.
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Jess: The mission statement started to include sustained well-being.
It was originally about achieving sustained competitive excellence, and then now it is added and wellbeing. And I think that that is such a small change to our mission, but had huge implications.
We have really started thinking of the athlete as a whole person and to segment any part of this no longer works. And so I think that it really just [01:07:00] follows kind of the movement in sport. And the shift in the culture is thinking of athletes as human beings.
More and more Olympians were viewed as human beings dealing with wide-ranging issues.
Jess: There's been anxiety, there's been depression. There's been sleep issues. That was actually our number one issue going into Tokyo was, was our athletes weren't sleeping well. One of the other ones has been body image and eating concerns. That was something that came up quite a bit.
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And then on top of those, struggling with drugs and alcohol. So those are the six that we've really chosen to screen for and think come up quite a bit.
In the fall of 2020, the USOPC issued a survey that served as a screening tool to raise the flag on athletes going through mental health issues and who might be a harm to themselves or others. The results were stunning. About 80 of the 165 athletes who filled out the questionnaire – almost 50 percent —- were identified as potentially having a mental health problem.
Jess met with each one of those athletes to provide support. Then, Jess and her team traveled to Tokyo for the games. It was the first time Team USA officials were present specifically to support the mental well-being of athletes.
In Tokyo, Jess says her team received about 10 requests every day to support athletes’ mental health needs. The requests
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involved everything from athletes receiving unexpected news from home, to dealing with underperformance, to their struggles while in quarantine.
Jess: We had things from an athlete suffering a miscarriage. We had another athlete who found out she was pregnant and couldn't quite decide if she was excited or not.
We just had a number of things that came up and it was just really important to be able to have some mental health resources at the games.
Then, during the Tokyo Games, mental health became front and center in a bigger, much more public way.
BILES NEWS CLIP: ABC NEWS LIVE
Broadcaster: Gymnast Simone Biles, the Greatest of All-Time, is withdrawing from another Olympic event to focus on her mental health. This comes after she pulled out of the team finals yesterday.
BILES NEWS CLIP: CBS EVENING NEWS
Norah: The story everyone is talking about is gymnastics superstar Simone Biles who has brought the issue of mental health to the forefront of the Games…..
It was the biggest story of the games.
You couldn’t turn on the Olympic coverage without hearing about it: Simone Biles, the most decorated gymnast ever, was withdrawing from team competition.
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Biles talked about the stress of competing at the Olympics as the reason for sitting out. And her courageous decision shined a light on mental health issues during a time when so many around the world were facing anxieties and depression. It was so easy to relate to Simone, and to empathize.
But the moment also exposed how far we still had to go in terms of the conversation of mental health and elite athletes. Because to a lot of people, Biles should have just powered through.
Jason: [8:30] Oh Simone Biles is already a hero, and I’m like what world are we living in where an Olympic athlete could quit in the middle of a team performance?
Michael: [3:30] Think about the person whose spot she took. And then this gal took another gal’s spot because she just didn’t have the right feels that day. She said, no I’m not having as much fun as I used to. Imagine the guy storming Normandie. You know I’m not having as much fun!
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Julie: You saw the backlash that Simone Biles got for dropping out of competitions in Tokyo. And a lot of people questioning her strength and her dedication to her country, which to me is ridiculous. We won't really be done with this until criticism like that stops being so prevalent.
Julie’s right—-the criticism is ridiculous. If Biles had had a leg injury, there wouldn’t be any second guessing of her decision.
Helen, for example, has a support system in place that includes world class doctors and specialists when it comes to physical injuries. A big breakthrough for Helen was recognizing that she needed that same support system when it came to mental health.
Molly: The way that athletes address work through physical traumas and illnesses is pretty straightforward. But addressing mental trauma and illness is not, or hasn’t been. You get a team, they lead you through a protocol of
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recovery. But mental trauma, you had to fight for that.
Helen: Yeah, I have this amazing mentor.
Her name is Leila Ferguson. She was a Canadian Olympian and she basically mentored me through everything, uh, over the last like five, six years. And I remember when I first told her about the PTSD diagnosis [01:28:00] and I would just check in with her weekly.
And one day I just called her and I said, I can't practice right now. Like I, something triggered me and I it, and when something was triggering, it wasn't like a okay, emotional and you cry and you're a little bit upset. It like, literally felt like it wiped my body and my strength out.
And I said, I don't want to tell the coach this new coach that I'm working with, that I can't come to practice today because I'm just, I just needed an emotional day.
And she goes, Helen, if you had twisted your ankle, You would take a day off. Right. And I said, yeah, absolutely. You know, if it was really bad and I couldn't walk on it and she goes, well, sometimes we need to take like an emotional day off too or spiritual day. And I said, well, I'm afraid if I do that, that I'll, I'll make that, a crutch and I'll do that a lot.
And she said,
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that's, athlete's biggest fears. And she's like, I guarantee you take this day off and you'll be surprised that you probably won't take another one again. And so I called the coach and I said, Hey, I hope you understand. I just, I need to stay to myself.
And he was absolutely cool with it. And then I literally just didn’t need to do that again. Like, it was so wild.
More and more athletes like Helen may be prioritizing mental health, but Jess says there’s still plenty of work to do in changing the conversation.
Jess: The more people in the public eye who can speak to mental health, the further it's going to destigmatize the further it's going to normalize.
We have more and more stories of athletes who are coming out that are struggling with mental health. Who are talking about how they manage it and what they need, and what's important to them.
Olympians talking about their struggles gives other Olympians space to open up about their vulnerabilities too. Helen tells her story to help teammates, friends and strangers.
Helen: I know I definitely don't have the answers for people.
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I'm just sharing my experience because if any of it resonates or maybe they're like, oh yeah, I, you know, uh, okay. I, I do feel that way or, oh, maybe I should, you know, maybe I should talk to my parents more about this, or maybe I just have to accept that people might not understand and that that's okay.
Helen thinks her story can resonate specifically with women and girls.
Helen: I was just putting on this facade really. And I could only do it for so long. And so I just would love for girls to know that, no, you, you don't have to fit in to belong. Like you belong here. And however you are, and however, you've been born with your unique personality, that's something that you bring to the table.
In 2018, when she hit rock bottom, Helen was ready to quit. In the following months, she continued treatment for PTSD and gave herself the time to rest and heal. She watched movies, she danced. She did a lot of things, but she didn’t wrestle.
Once Helen allowed herself the time and space to fully heal, her strength and sharpness returned – along with her love of competition.
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And in 2021, when the Olympics were back, Helen was back, too.
Helen: I came back to the sport because I didn't want to have any regrets. And I felt that I needed to know that I could do this myself that I didn't need a particular person. Like even if I fall flat on my face, I just, like, I want to tell my kids one day that, you know, I give it my best shot.
Helen didn’t win gold at Tokyo. She took bronze. But the moment was just as sweet as 2016—-sweeter, in fact.
Helen: I remember even after I lost, teammates came to check in on me and they, you know, they weren't sure, you know, how it would take it cause there's a lot of pressure to, to, to repeat. And I just had so much peace. Why would I fight so hard through so much stuff to come back to lose a match at this tournament and then spend the rest of my life bitter about it?
Like, hell no, I'm going to look at this whole moment with joy and just gratitude. And it was, it was a dream come true.
Molly: I have the biggest smile on my face right now.
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Did it seem like people were talking about being more open about mental health struggles during this last Olympics?
Helen: Yeah, absolutely.
I remember, I think I read a tweet somewhere and it said, you know, this Olympics had the most, um, athletes going to the, you know, they provide like, I guess, um, [01:19:00] on site psychological and mental health resources. And it said it had the most athletes ever, you know apply for that during this Olympics.
And so if this is how the like elite athletes in, in sport are handling this whole time in this post pandemic year, imagine how everybody is handling it. And I think that maybe everything that happened just it made it so that like, you can't, we can't hide behind anything anymore.
Like, there are a lot of struggles going on and everyone has struggled with something, you know. And I think that just finally made it okay for all of us to be like, yeah, we're, we're all similar in this.
And maybe we should all just start talking about this so we can help each other.
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Molly Bloom: TORCHED is a production of FilmNation Entertainment in association with Gilded Audio.
It’s executive produced by me -- Molly Bloom, Alyssa Martino, Milan Popelka, Andy Chugg, and Whitney Donaldson. This episode was produced by Nicki Stein and Kelsey Albright. It was written by Albert Chen. Technical direction and engineering by Nick Dooley. Original music by James Lavino.
Special thanks to Alison Cohen, Matt Aizenstadt and Omar Tarbush.
Molly: Next time on Torched, we turn to the Olympics stage itself to learn what it takes to make the Games happen, and how cities around the world make the critical – and often controversial – decision… to host or not to host.
Victor: The problem with the Olympics is they've got all of these sports that are somewhat obscure and you
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just don't need a 10,000 seat swimming facility or a world-class velodrome in any city in the world.
Molly: That’s next time on Torched.
Thanks for listening to Torched. If you’re enjoying the show, please leave a review on your favorite podcast app. It really helps us find new listeners.
We’ll see you next week.
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