Inside cricketer’s crippling battle with depression
At the height of Moises Henriques’ crippling battle with depression he would struggle to make simple decisions. What to eat? Should he leave the house? The NSW star opens up
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Moises Henriques lay in bed, his mind wandering and his heart racing.
Insomnia was just one of the symptoms.
“The physiological one I remember distinctly was feeling like I had a squash ball in my chest, all day every day,” Henriques told the Sunday Herald Sun.
“Finding it hard to breathe and there were times where I felt like I was actually having heart attacks.
“But it was just what they call a panic attack over trivial things that, when I look back now, I’m like, ‘Geez, I can’t believe I reacted to certain things in that way’.”
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As Movember finished on Saturday, a happy Henriques, 32, bowled to Victoria at the MCG.
But at the height of Henriques’ crippling battle with depression he would struggle to make simple decisions.
What to eat? Should he go out or stay home? It was all too hard.
Suddenly, he didn’t want to do any of the activities that once brought him joy.
“For me that was getting outside, going to the beach, walking the dog, playing golf, playing cricket,” he said.
“It was almost a case of trying to force myself into doing them again – faking it until you make it – because I’d build up this anxiety about not wanting to do them because bad things would happen.
“Once I met those challenges I realised they were just little fragments of my imagination.”
Once Henriques woke up the day before a Sheffield Shield game and burst into tears. He wasn’t even sure why.
Then the sleepless nights spiralled out of control.
“There’s not being able to sleep, and then there’s properly not being able to sleep and feeling like your heart is racing and like you’re running a marathon,” Henriques said.
“Not being able to sleep is what I felt happened when you just weren’t able to cope with the present and unable to cope with the thoughts going on in your mind at the present.
“Because I never changed those behaviours they just grew into more and more irrational thought patterns.”
When Henriques was 25 he worried what would happen if he missed out on a big score in his next match.
Soon a fear of eternal loneliness was keeping him awake.
“I was thinking about what if I’m 60 and lonely, what a sad life. I was so far removed from the present … you definitely don’t want to get to that stage.”
It’s a chilling depiction of anxiety, and there are two good reasons for Henriques choosing every word so carefully.
The first is that Henriques — due to shave off the moustache he grew for Movember — has studied mental health closer than most.
In two months he read 10-15 books, including The Courage to be Disliked, Awareness: Conversations with the Masters and Beating the Blues, in a bid to learn everything about the brain.
“It’s amazing how much time you find when you’re so desperate to beat something,” he said.
“I tried almost everything that anyone possibly advised. I tried medication and I had therapy the whole way through.”
Henriques started with a one-hour therapy appointment every two weeks. In that time he would spend 80 hours completing physical training.
“It was kind of like, ‘Let’s try to get these ratios right’ and start working on my mental training maybe five hours a day and my physical training can back down a little bit for now,” he said.
“I’m clearly physically fit enough, and nowhere near mentally fit enough. It was just trying to change my ratios.
“It was just a matter of training, really. Just like if you want to train your physical body to get better, it’s the same thing with the brain.
“I threw all my spare time at it.”
The second reason Henriques is able to so clearly articulate his battle is he has opened up before.
In 2018 he penned an article. However the many sentences starting with ‘I feel’ made him uncomfortable.
Henriques “wanted to make the story about the disease, not me” and so he called in esteemed cricket writer Gideon Haigh.
Mental health’s grip on cricket has never been tighter. Last month it became the No.1 issue as Victorians Glenn Maxwell, Nic Maddinson and Will Pucovski all stepped away.
“Straight away that made me sad,” Henriques said.
“I empathise that if it’s got to the stage where people feel like they need to take some time off what they love doing, then it’s usually got to a really bad stage where they’re not coping with their life very well.
“I remember that not being a very nice place to be. I remember waking up thinking I just want to run away from this and I wouldn’t have wished that on my worst enemy.
“So it’s not nice to read other people are going through it, especially two of those guys are really close friends of mine as well that I know really well.”
It was during a deep conversation with Henriques that teammate Sean Abbott decided to take a break from cricket.
“I said to him, ‘You’re not going to feel better unless you teach yourself how to feel better’,” Henriques said, albeit downplaying his help.
“You’re not going to wake up one morning and just go, ‘Oh, yeah. Now I feel good’. It’s something you actually have to train at and learn to do.
“You might score a hundred and you might feel better for a little while if you score that hundred, but once the runs dry up you don’t want to be relying on positive results or external factors to make you feel good.
“You want to rely on your own thought processes to make you feel content or happy.
“I barely ever see him at the cafe without a book in his hand now. I’m not sure if he does any reading or just looks at the title, but at least he’s trying.”
But why did Henriques choose to go public?
“I vividly remember waking up a few mornings and, even though I was going through depression, how lucky I was that I had a roof over my head and so many people trying to help and support me,” he said.
“Imagine being homeless and going through this. That’s when I realised that if I did get through it I wanted to bridge the gap between what I had available to me and what some people have available to them.
“Without education and some resources it would almost be impossible thing to (stop) your mind just ticking into oblivion.”
Henriques submitted to a long interview after Thursday’s long training session at the MCG. He remained engaged throughout, and that was one of the “light bulb moments” from his reading.
“You learn how to become a little bit more aware and a little bit more in the present, rather than stuck about your own worries and anxieties and what might happen tomorrow or next week,” he said.
Henriques kept his battle “inside me for five or six years”. Now he is the ideal sounding board.
“There’s no way when I was actually going through what I was that I would’ve felt comfortable enough to speak to anyone about it,” he said.
“But after I spoke there were people feeling terrible that did feel comfortable enough to speak to me.
“That was part of the purpose, because I remember coming home and thinking, ‘Why have I been living this way for so long? Why did I let that go on without saying anything for so long’.
“The earlier you act the easier it is to cut these things off and turnaround negative thoughts.”
MENTAL HEALTH
— One in eight men will have depression and one in five men will experience anxiety at some point
— A report released by Movember in October found 51 per cent of 18-34 year-olds have avoided talking about their problems because they don’t want to appear less of a man
— 35 per cent of Australian men – of all ages – said they felt under pressure to behave in a masculine way and 59 per cent believed that society expects them to be “emotionally strong” and not show weakness
— In September, Movember research found that one in three employed Australian men fear their job could be at risk if they discuss their mental health at work
MOVEMBER
— The Movember Cricket Association fundraising tally has hit more than $235,000
— An estimated 618km of moustache hair has been grown by over 81,000 Mo growers around Australia.
Originally published as Inside cricketer’s crippling battle with depression