‘Lowest point in my entire life’: Leisel Jones opens up on mental health battle

Aussie swimming legend Leisel Jones has revealed the simple act that saved her life at the deepest point of her mental health battle.

Aussie swimming legend Leisel Jones has opened up on the mental health struggle throughout her swimming career, including how a simple knock on her hotel room door saved her life.

The four-time Olympian had a glittering career starting at the Sydney Games at the tender age of just 15, claiming three golds and nine medals overall.

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But after reaching the high of her first, and what would turn out to be only, individual Olympic gold medal in the 2008 Olympics, Jones revealed on the LiSTNR podcast A Life of Greatness she went into a spiral.

Publicly, Jones had been a mainstay of the Australian swimming team, a world record holder and a world champion many times over.

But privately she was battling demons.

Nearing the end of her swimming career — she retired after the ill-fated 2012 London Olympics — Jones revealed she was struggling to find who she was outside of the pool.

“(My mental health struggle) was very much wrapped in identity,” Jones said.

“My whole identity, my self-worth everything that I believed in was wrapped in swimming, and once I achieved the gold medal that I so desperately wanted throughout my whole career, I really questioned ‘well, who am I without swimming?’

“I was ready to retire, I wanted to move on, but I couldn’t because I had nothing else. I didn’t have a life outside of swimming. I hadn’t studied anything. I didn’t know what I liked doing every day.

“Once a question was asked to me it was like, ‘Well, if you don’t swim, what are you going to do?’ When I didn’t have an answer, I thought: ‘I don’t know. Like, I don’t know what to do. I don’t I don’t really want to train anymore. I’ve achieved everything I wanted — what am I supposed to do now?’

“When I didn’t have an answer for what I even liked doing, I just got stuck in this loop of well, I need to keep swimming because I have nothing else, what else am I going to do? I couldn’t even contemplate retiring because there was nothingness. I couldn’t work a job because I had no work experience. I didn’t know what to do with myself every day of getting up and not doing any training.”

Leisel Jones after winning the women's 100m breaststroke final.

Jones wanted to be the first Australian swimmer to compete at four Olympic Games but said: “my heart wasn’t really into that I just didn’t really care”.

It started her mental health decline as she didn’t want to be at training and “everything started to unravel”.

“I thought well, there were no other options for me there was no work or study or anything like that. That I just didn’t see a way out of it,” she added.

Jones admitted her thoughts got so dark she was contemplating taking her own life.

Although she has spoken about her mental health battles in the past, most notably in her memoir Body Lengths, Jones revealed how she was saved in the lowest moment of her life during a training camp in Spain in 2011.

It came when an unnamed coach knocked on her door.

“It’s one of those sliding door moments that you can’t believe the timing of how he came and knocked on my door at that time,” Jones told A Life of Greatness.

“He knew that I was struggling but probably not to the extent that I was really feeling because I just didn’t let anyone see that side.

“And so for him to knock on the door when I was just at my lowest point and I just thought ‘I just want out of here away from all of this and I need to make this go away right now’.

“For him to knock on the door, I was just bawling my eyes out and he just gave me the biggest hug and he was like ‘we need to get you out of here’ and then just started the process right then and there.

“It’s one of those things where you’re like, I have no idea who sent you or I have no idea how you knew to knock on the door at that time. But you did and that was a pivotal moment in my healing where you can pinpoint the lowest point in my entire life was right there in that instant. That two seconds just before he knocked on the door was the lowest point of my entire life.

“It’s almost like when he opened the door like just putting your hand out and then just taking that hand and then going on the journey upwards. It’s just so amazing to look back at that time and go, I can actually pinpoint to a two second frame in my life that was my lowest and his hand was the one that pulled me out.”

Jones at the London Games.

Life is good for Leisel. Photo: Pete Wallis

Jones had qualified for both the 100m breaststroke and the 4x100m medley relay, finishing 5th and second respectively to add a ninth Olympic medal.

But the Games which is more remembered for Australia’s Stillnox scandal also saw Jones fatshamed in a newspaper article on the eve of the games.

“It hugely affected me and that was a big part of my mental health journey,” Jones said.

“The year before, I’d had a huge amount of mental health issues, was considering taking my life, I was just desperate at this point, just so low and I’ve never been that low before or ever again and just needing so much psychological help. And I went on antidepressants, which made me put on weight.

“So to have someone comment on my personal appearance and things that have absolutely nothing to do with my performance at that time – for sure, criticise my performance, not a problem and if I didn’t step up to expectations — but I was at my fourth Olympic Games, I had this mental health trial the year before and was just trying to get through that.

“But no one asked those questions and no one even bothered to go back and say what was actually happening.”

‘So brave’: Jones back Chalmers stance

Jones compared her treatment to the which Aussie superfish Kyle Chalmers went through during the Australian swimming championships and the Commonwealth Games.

Having previously dated Aussie swim queen Emma McKeon, Chalmers written into a love triangle with her new beau and national team teammate Cody Simpson, a claim all three strongly denied.

Chalmers called out the media for its questioning and said he wanted to leave the Commonwealth Games, speaking openly about his mental health battles during the meet.

Leisel Jones knows right where Kyle Chalmers is coming from.

Jones backed Chalmers’ stance, however, saying he “is so brave to stand up and say ‘please stop’.”

“To say that this is distracting and hurtful, and to say ‘I’m not going to continue if you continue to write headlines like this’, I love that he said that because I would have given anything to have a voice like that back then,” Jones said.

“This is the good side of social media. This is where Instagram is so fantastic because he can then put up a post and say: ‘I won’t tolerate this and I don’t appreciate this and for my mental health, you need to stop’.”

“When I was competing it was all very filtered through media. We only had small opportunities to talk to press when it was after a competition or after a swim, that I didn’t have that chance and to be honest, it’s too distracting. So I just had to move past it suck it up, get on with the job try and forget about it as much as possible and just squash it and say ‘I’m not talking about this right now, I’ve got a job to do’. And then I just had to process it on my own when I got home.”

“The great side of social media is I could have made a huge statement and said: ‘This is disgraceful journalism. This is not what we tolerate. This is hurtful not only to women, but to men, to girls, to boys … it doesn’t matter who you’re affecting, you can’t be putting headlines out there about appearance because it’s got nothing to do with that.

“Whether I would have done that, I don’t know … but it would have been so nice to have that voice or that platform to say how I really felt at that time.

“Maybe I would have done something like Kyle just to put out a big warning to say: ‘You’ve got to stop. Stop with the headlines, it’s enough’.”