David Penberthy: You don’t have to be a mental health expert to ask a simple question
HAVE you seen your mate lately? Footy great Scott Hodges reckons that’s the best question you can ask in the fight against suicide, writes David Penberthy.
- Scott Hodges book extract 1: My Footy hell
- Scott Hodges book extract 2: The day I wanted to end my life
- ‘The day I decided to beat up Jars’
- The day Buddy made me stand up
DAN Vickerman, James Hird, Grant Hackett, Alex Fasolo, Travis Cloke, Lauren Jackson... in the past few months, Australian sport has provided a lengthy roll-call of big names who have battled or succumbed to depression. These people share a common quality — they often appeared superhuman on the sporting arena and all too human off it.
Life is a weird thing. Twenty three years ago I was among the crowd of 40,000 at Adelaide’s Football Park watching Port Adelaide play the Woodville-West Torrens Eagles in the SANFL grand final. The Eagles kicked the first six goals and looked like they had it won. Port ground their way back and full forward Scott Hodges kicked five goals in the final quarter, a typically remarkable effort from a bloke who won a staggering eight premierships with the Magpies.
Nineteen years later I was picking up my son from school footy training and chatting to one of the dads with whom I’d become friendly. One of the kids passed him a ball.
“See how far you can kick it Scott,” he said. My mate tilted back and kicked through the point of this tiny size 4 football. It travelled about 50m. Suddenly I twigged. “Far out mate, you’re Scott Hodges, aren’t you?”
Two years ago I got a phone call. It was the day Sydney’s Lance Franklin had announced he was missing the 2015 AFL finals due to depression. “That stuff with Buddy,” Scott said, “well, that’s me, mate. I’ve had it for years. It’s a bastard of a thing and I want us to do something public about it.”
While the story Scott Hodges tells is harrowing, it is eclipsed in a way by the fact that of his 300-odd teammates from an 11-year football career, five have died at their own hand. I’m not sure if this is statistically unusual or in keeping with the patterns in the broader community but, either way, it is a whole stack of fine blokes lost far before their time.
Scott’s own battles, those deaths of his teammates, the roll call of big names above… all this suggests that there might be something unique about sportspeople when it comes to this scourge. Two things they face that the rest of us can avoid are intense public scrutiny and an accelerated sense of self-doubt. If you’ve had a bad day as an accountant, you generally don’t get booed on the way back to the car.
And the great existential question — what’s it all about? — becomes harder when you put your life on hold to follow your sporting dream and find at the grand old age of 30, when your most rewarding years are behind you, that you need to do something else for another five decades.
This is an evil double-whammy as it goes to the core of what other people think about you and what you think about yourself.
Hodges kicked a whole stack of goals. He won South Australian footy’s highest individual honour and will hold the state’s goalkicking record, a lazy 153 in just one season, forever more.
But I reckon his greatest achievement, aside from having a terrific family, is having the balls to put his entire life out there in the hope that some young bloke battling his demons will have the same reaction Scott did to the Buddy Franklin news. To say: “That’s me”, and to do something about it.
For those of us blessed with the gift of happiness, Hodges’ book — Not All Black And White — contains valuable advice as to how we can help make sure that all our mates stay with us for the ride.
It stems from a seriously heartbreaking and thoughtful conversation Scott had with his teammate, Tim Ginever, after the death last year of former Port ruckman David Baker, aged just 57. I will finish this column with it as it speaks for itself.
“When we got together after Bakes’s death to drown our sorrows, the big question Timmy and I had that day was: ‘How do you find out if someone has depression if they’re not going to tell you about it?’
“You hear it all the time. When people are gone, everyone stands around scratching their heads and saying: ‘None of us knew’. Even psychologists struggle to answer that question.
“What I concluded is this: everyone has mates. Mates will do anything they can to support each other. You bend over backwards for your mates. I want people to think about their mates. Have you seen them lately? Have you spoken to them lately?
“If you have a group of mates and you have a regular catch-up, be it a weekly arvo at the pub or a pissy dinner every three months or so, has one of your mates suddenly started not coming and giving you excuses about why?
“Obviously there are times when people get busy. You might have a mate who is doing a reno, or tied up with a promotion, or looking after his pregnant wife or something, and all that’s fine. But there are other times when blokes just become isolated and withdrawn and pull back from all their socialising because they are not well and they don’t want to talk about it.
“Often the people who you push away are the ones who are closest to you. If you haven’t seen one of your close mates for three to six months, and he hasn’t given you a proper reason why, alarm bells should be ringing.
“I know that, for a very long time, I would pull away from people. It was like I had gone into hiding and I was virtually a recluse. Because you feel like you are worthless, you think that no-one would really want to see you anyway. I never want to go back there again.”
If you need help contact Lifeline on 13 11 14 or beyondblue on 1300 224 636