Cricket’s mental health crisis now the sport’s greatest challenge, with no easy solution
Australian cricket is grappling with an acute mental health crisis within the sport and, for all the obvious empathy, is tasked with effectively caring for those suffering without any straightforward solutions.
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Australian cricket has a mental health crisis ... and no-one seems quite sure how to solve it.
For that, the game has our sympathy rather than our scorn.
Like thousands of parents around the country born in simpler times, cricket officials are trying to solve the problems of a world they did not grow up in and, for all their research and empathy, struggle to fully understand.
Society is changing so rapidly with young minds being bombarded and cluttered with the stresses of social media that it was almost inevitable that there had to be some sort of crisis before ways were invented to counter it.
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With Will Pucovski, Nic Maddinson and Glenn Maxwell standing down due to mental issues Australia has some serious thinking to do about the road forward.
It’s tricky because each case is different and because you cannot treat mental issues like physical ones.
It’s not like saying “hamstring ... three weeks.’’
With mental health issues, designated timelines don’t matter and recoveries often don’t happen with a smooth graph that rises steadily with treatment.
Pucovski was fine for a while last year, then suddenly, when chosen for Australia, the selectors noticed he was not quite right and did not play him.
He was sound again this season then suddenly not so good so he made the call himself.
National selectors Justin Langer and Trevor Hohns have our sympathy as do the players.
There is no formula in place go solve this issue.
What complicates the problem-solving is that the reasons for the mental strain are not the clichéd ones from yesteryear.
In bygone eras if you said someone was suffering from mental health issues you might suspect the cause was a broken marriage, financial hardship, poor form or a family health issue. We wanted to believe you had to be down on your luck to be sad.
If the current issues have taught us anything it is that success and failure can sometimes have little to do with it and that the causes of the anguish are many and varied.
Sometimes, the psychologists tell us, there actually are no reasons other than a chemical imbalance in the brain.
Form-wise Maddinson was on top of the world this summer. Maxwell is financially set for life and played well in a T20 game just days before standing down. Pucovski was a hair’s breath away from a Test cap. Yet all bravely stepped away.
Cricket may not be a physical contact sport but its mental challenges, with so much waiting time, are much tougher than they look.
Most batsmen fail most of the time so the mental demands can be taxing.
Even though cricket is only starting to go public with its mental issues it is always been a supremely demanding mental game as evidenced by the fact that it remains the only game to ever have a book written about players who took their own lives.
The victory of the current crisis is that at least players are talking as they talk in other sports.
In rugby league Broncos captain Darius Boyd gets enormous satisfaction from helping players with their mental health issues because he had to work hard to overcome is own.
He tells people how he would hear a lone voice call out and bag him from the crowd and it would rock his focus on the game.
It surprises people because Boyd always looks so calm, simply proving the point that you never know what is happening inside a man’s head, as cricket has found out this season.
Originally published as Cricket’s mental health crisis now the sport’s greatest challenge, with no easy solution