1. Surviving the “Treadmill of Turmoil”: Mental Illness, Shame, and Emotion in Professional Sport Copenhagen Summer School 2011 Andy Smith University of Chester, UK andy.smith@chester.ac.uk

2. Objectives Examine the prevalence of mental illness in society and professional sport Mental illness and the culture of sport: sport-specific processes Mental illness and sport: society-specific processes (shame, emotion, individualization) Understanding mental illness: the sociology of emotions and sport

3. Types of Mental Illness Mental Illness Drug Dependence Depression Bipolar Disorder Dementia, Alzheimer disease Schizophrenia Eating Disorders Anxiety Disorders

4. >1 in 5 >1 in 4 < 1 in 10 ~ 1 in 5

5. Prevalence of Mental Illness One million British 5-16-year-olds estimated to be mentally ill (Wilkinson and Pickett, 2010) Suicide: 850,000 people die/year from depression-related suicide Suicide: biggest cause of death in men <45 - about 30 killing themselves each week Suicide rates for men are 2-3 times higher than women in most western countries (Riska, 2009) What are dominant social attitudes towards mental illness?

6. Mental Illness and Sport (1) Sport participation generates pathologies associated with mental illness (2) Participation compromised by broader life- events (e.g. family break-up, illness, death) and social background (e.g. gender, class) (3) Those with mental health problems may actively seek out participation in sport to manage their mental illness (Carless and Douglas, 2010; Giordano, 2010) Elite athletes are not immune from mental illness despite their status and lifestyles (Cashmore, 2010; Mummery, 2005) YouTube - Robert Enke and Frank Bruno are among those to suffer the demons of depressionYouTube - Robert Enke and Frank Bruno are among those to suffer the demons of depression

7. ‘Prisoners of Depression’? (1) Robert Enke – committed suicide in November 2009 (2) Terry Newton – found hanged in September 2010 (3) Ricky Hatton – admitted to The Priory in September 2010 after using cocaine, related to depression and alcohol abuse (4) Andre Agassi - deep depression in 1997 led him to use crystal meth (5) Cycling – Bradley Wiggins (‘drinking and riding alone’), Graham Obree (‘the social equivalent of a human’s appendix’) (6) American football – Dave Duerson, Ricky Williams, Russ Johnson (Sports Illustrated, 2003)

8. Kelly Holmes: Self-Harming ‘There was no doubt in my mind that my biggest weakness was my lack of confidence, which stemmed from my injury problems … After one particularly frustrating day, I suddenly felt as if I couldn’t cope any longer. I stood in the bathroom of our room in the apartment, locked the door and stared in the mirror, feeling utterly miserable. I was crying uncontrollably … There was a pair of scissors in a cup on a shelf … I picked them up, opened them and started to cut my left arm with one of the blades. One cut for everyday that I had been injured. With each one, I felt I was punishing myself but at the same time I felt a sense of release that drove me to do it again. The pain was intense at first but then it seemed to numb as I went over the same area again and again. When the cuts bled I would stop, but I was still in tears and feeling as though I didn’t want to be in this world’ (Holmes, 2005: 191)

9. Self-Medicating: Illegal Drug Use ‘I’m an addict struggling against my addictions and that’s never going to change … On a good day it’s snooker. On a bad day, it’s drugs. My biggest thing has been cannabis … Part of my addictive personality is striving for perfection, and because I never achieved it, I constantly felt a sense of failure. It had been the pattern for my life for six or seven years: strive for perfection, fail to achieve it, despair. The strange thing was I was quite comfortable being miserable. Whenever I was miserable I was quite happy, if that makes any sense. I was used to being in that position, and I had an excuse to shut people out, and get pissed or stoned. What made me most uncomfortable was when I had no right to be depressed’ (O’Sullivan, 2003: 103)

10. Suffering in Public and Anomie ‘I was public property, a celebrity … you have to live up to an image someone else has created for you. My image had always been the happy-go- lucky joker’ (Bruno, 2005: 5-7) Diagnosed with bi-polar disorder in 1998 and descended into a state of anomie (Durkheim, 1897): ‘I missed boxing. Really missed it... then I tried cocaine... I loved the buzz it gave me … I didn’t know who to turn to and I was lonely … this was worse than anything I’d been through in the ring’ (Bruno, 2005: 220) The unintended outcomes of celebrity - can demand that athletes’ ‘personal troubles’ become ‘public issues’ (Wright Mills, 1959)

11. Cricket and Suicide Frith (2001): The suicide rate among British men is 1.07% but 1.77% for cricketers (+75%) Elsewhere: South Africa 4.12%, New Zealand 3.92%, Australia 2.75% The ‘relentless and dehumanising schedule’ (Briggs, 2011) of international cricket The ‘emotional fragility’ of players, time spent away from family, and the ‘never-ending treadmill’ (Briggs, 2011) Durkheim (1897) ‘Suicide’ is the most individual act one can commit: (1) Individual motives are important; but (2) variations related to social inequalities more sociologically significant

12. Cricket and Depression The ‘beast that lives inside’ (Trescothick, 2011) ‘All day long in the field the feelings had been growing more and more intense. And then, as though someone flicked a switch, I knew it was over. I asked the umpire if I could go off for a leak and I never came back. As I started to walk back to the pavilion the tears began to well up. ‘The illness had come back, the bastard had returned, and the shadow cast by its black wings had consumed me again. The fight was over. I had no fight left … I just sat on the couch, facing the wall, with my head in my hands crying my eyes out … I was weak and pathetic and letting everyone down … I didn’t want to admit to having failed’ (Trescothick, 2008: 316)

13. Snooker and Depression Surviving the “treadmill of turmoil” (O’Sullivan, 2011) Personal circumstances and sport- specific pressures (Dott, 2011) “We all live out of suitcases and, for me, it's just come to a head … It does get very lonely when you're looking at the four walls of a hotel room for most of the year … I've been a professional for a few years now and all I've done since then is play snooker, I've known nothing else … being a snooker player is a very lonely life” (Allen, 2011)

14. Structure and Culture of Sports The culture of failure is institutionalized in sport - ‘driven by fear of failure’ (Obree, 2010) Many athletes’ addictive personalities and search for perfectionism associated with mental illness Now ‘a stronger focus on winning and winners’ (Carless and Doulgas, 2010: 93) Broader social processes: commercialization, medicalization and professionalization (Cashmore, 2010; Maguire, 1992; Waddington and Smith, 2009) Putting on ‘the game face’ (Gallmeier, 1987)

15. Shame and Emotion Mental illness: bio-psycho-social behaviour Shame as the social emotion (Scheff, 1988) ‘For me to admit to suffering from depression was a matter of shame and embarrassment, provoking feelings of inadequacy and fear of what people might think of me’ (Tescothick, 2008: 246) Obree (2010: 53) ‘the depression and shame and self-hatred became so strong that I could not bear to be alive any more’ Importance of social-evaluation anxieties and vulnerability (Wilkinson and Pickett, 2010)

16. Shame and Emotion A sociological theory of emotions for sport and leisure (Maguire, 1991, 1993) Clarifying the problem of ‘the hinge’ (Elias, 1987): connection between biological changes and social development Elias (1987: 352) ‘humans not only can but must learn in order to become fully human’ – learned behaviours and emotions are key Structured by habitus and occurs within the context of socially patterned interdependencies (Elias, 1987; Maguire, 1991)

17. Individualization and Interdependence A tendency to see oneself as Homo clausus and not Homines aperti (Elias, 1978, 2001) Many highly-individualized people value ‘their freedom, their ability to act on their own responsibility and to decide for themselves’ (Elias, 2001: 129) – to be different Feelings of greater isolation from others and feelings of ‘separateness and encapsulation of individuals in their relations to each other’ (Elias, 2001: 121) The two-edged character of individualization: shift in the balance between the ‘we-’ and ‘I-’ identity integral to the social habitus

18. Stigmatization and Identity Stigma: ‘an attribute that is deeply discrediting’ (Goffman, 1963: 3) Mental illness becomes part of athletes’ ‘spoiled identity’ (Goffman, 1972) and ‘presentation of the self’ (Goffman, 1959) Mentally ill athletes: deviant ‘folk devils’ (Cohen, 1972) and ‘outsiders’ who internalize their own ‘group disgrace’ (Elias and Scotson, 1965)? ‘You just want to carry on and go about your job. You feel like a bit of a failure if you like. You feel like you’re giving in to something, and the term stress-related illness has got a bit of a stigma attached to it’ (Trescothick, 2008: 311-12)

19. Summary Athletes whose experiences are known publicly are likely to represent the tip of a larger iceberg Athletes subject to particular sporting constraints that compound structurally generated society-specific processes Mental illness is a habitus and interdependence problem par excellence (Elias, 1978; Goudsblom, 1977) Mental illness: bio-genesis, psycho-genesis, and socio-genesis (Elias, 1987) We need much greater attention to ‘the social construction of emotions’ (Maguire, 1991: 30) and mental illness in sport and society

20. Some Reflective Questions How do we develop more-or-less adequate sociological explanations of mental illness in society and sport? How do we explain the patterns of behaviour associated with mental illness and the outcomes involved? What does mental illness tell us about existing social inequalities and social attitudes in wider society? How can we account, sociologically, for perceptions of stigma and the social treatment of those labelled ‘mentally ill’? To what extent does the structure of sport contribute to views and experiences of mental illness? YouTube - The Mind 4 of 5 - Depression in Sports - BBC Inside Sports Mind Games Documentary