File photo of Graham Thorpe.
| Photo Credit: Reuters
It is so much easier to join the dots — or even look for them — after the picture is complete. It takes a reckless friend or an inspired doctor to see in the build-up such as the occasional nervous breakdown or suggestive statement the route to ultimate destruction. We are all wise after the event.
Graham Thorpe, one of England’s most successful batters, was only 55 when he took his own life this month. Those who knew him will be left wondering what they could have done to save him. That is but natural. Such tragedies become personal. Any death diminishes us.
When Thorpe’s wife called up Mike Atherton, his former captain and chief cricket correspondent of The Times, to talk about her husband, the news of the suicide was revealed for the first time. It came as a shock. This, despite some indications in his playing days, as when he had a breakdown during the Lord’s Test of 2002 against India. Thorpe wrote later, “there came a time when I would have given back all my Test runs and Test caps to be happy again.”
Study in restraint
Atherton’s revelation in his newspaper is a study in restraint and an example of how a delicate matter can be handled with sensitivity and empathy. It was courageous of Thorpe’s wife and children to have gone public.
“He was so unwell in recent times and he really did believe that we would be better off without him. We are devastated that he acted on that and took his own life,” Amanda, his wife, told Atherton. You can’t remain unaffected after reading that.
Atherton wrote, “The family contacted me because they wanted to express their gratitude to the many well-wishers and because they wanted to find a way, however hard that may be, of sharing some more information after a two-year silence. They want to heighten the awareness of the illness that took him, but also want to emphasise that his life should not be defined by that.”
No life should be defined by its final act. “He proved himself to be unquestionably the most complete batsman of our generation,” Atherton had written in his tribute, “and the best between the retirement of David Gower and the arrival of Kevin Pietersen.” Wasim Akram said he was the best left-hander he had bowled to.
It is an unfortunate quirk of the English language that the word ‘depression’ is used both for a temporary disappointment and for clinical depression which is a serious medical condition requiring long-term treatment.
Are sportspeople particularly susceptible? It is easy to imagine they have feelings of loneliness and worthlessness once their playing days are over and the last autograph has been signed. But that may not be the case at all. It just happens that the better known a person is, the better known his case is. We have no statistics on how many bank clerks or gardeners or accountants live with depression.
When Matthew Mott resigned as England’s white-ball coach last month, assistant Marcus Trescothick was put in temporary charge. Trescothick, whose book Coming Home To Me speaks of his own battles, was diagnosed with having “a depressive illness of mild to moderate severity with marked anxiety features.”
Sympathy
Since his admission, and that of later players including Ben Stokes, there has been a more sympathetic attitude towards the problem. “In that old macho way,” wrote Trescothick, “I didn’t want to admit to anyone what the problem might be…”
But that is no longer the case. There is sympathy rather than judgement now. Glen Maxwell, Jonathan Trott, Virat Kohli, Iain O’Brien, players from different parts of the world have all gone public with periods in their lives when they were depressed to a lesser or greater degree. Andrew Flintoff has spoken about his “crippling psychological injury”, and Monty Panesar has revealed he had “paranoia issues.”
An external injury is easily treated; but what happens inside an athlete’s mind is not so clearly understood. Or even acknowledged.
The Thorpe family’s openness will help raise awareness of depression and anxiety. This is important. Lack of understanding is a major stumbling block to reducing both the number of those who suffer from it and its severity.