KEVIN MCCALLUM: No-one likes to talk about depression, but talk about it we must

At the inquest into the suicide of former England batter Graham Thorpe this week, his wife revealed that he had asked her to “help him end his life”.

Thorpe died after being hit by a train at the Esher station in Surrey a little after 8.30am on August 4. Just 55, he struggled with depression and anxiety.

“Struggled” is the word that is always rolled out when talking about depression. For me, it doesn’t come close to describing the depth of darkness, confusion and hopelessness depression takes you to. Depression makes you writhe with emptiness, it brutally thrashes your very being, a brawl against an invisible and internal enemy who knows your weaknesses and how to negate your strengths. It’s you against the world, kid, and it’s you against the world. 

Thorpe took his own life on that morning in August, his widow Amanda said last year.

Speaking to the Surrey coroner’s court this week she testified: “In the weeks leading up to his death he told me he doesn’t want to be here any more. He asked me to help him end his life. He said he wants to go to Switzerland. I was in turmoil. Then we get a letter for an appointment [with the medical team] in a month’s time. How ill do you have to be? I just wish he could have been kept safe. If you’re not here, there’s no hope.”

Depression is called the silent killer, not only because you can’t see it, but because no-one likes to talk about depression. You’ll shake it off. Get over it.

Amanda Thorpe didn’t see any symptoms of psychological stress from her husband until 2020, even though he had been diagnosed with anxiety and depression in 2018. In 2022 he tried to take his own life after being sacked as an assistant coach with England after they had lost the Ashes 4-0.

His close friend, former England and Surrey teammate Adam Hollioake, described him thus: “Thorpey was a one-on-one guy. You didn’t get a lot out of him in team meetings. He wouldn’t pipe up in front of the team like me, Mark Butcher or Alec Stewart. He was one for a conversation in the corner.”

Those conversations in corners were cries for help. Many athletes are now shaking off the stigma of not speaking up. In his 2012 autobiography This is Me, Ian Thorpe, the Australian Olympic swimming champion, wrote that he was “extensively self-medicating with alcohol and began planning potential places to end his life”. 

Michael Phelps has 28 Olympic medals. In 2018 he told a mental health conference how he fell into dark depression after the 2004, 2008 and 2012 Olympics: “You do contemplate suicide,” he said. After London in 2012, he “didn’t want to be in the sport any more... I didn’t want to be alive any more” and hid away in his bedroom for “three to five days, not eating, barely sleeping and just not wanting to be alive”.

Last year, CNN quoted a British Journal of Sports Medicine report that found suicide was the “second leading cause of death after accidents in US college athletes — and rates have doubled from 7.6% to 15.3% over the past 20 years”.

The list goes on. There were signs Graham Thorpe was in a battle for his life two decades ago. The Sunday Times described him as “tense, troubled, introverted. That appearance was not deceptive. His life and work had become blighted by depression, drinking and divorce, as he disclosed in searing detail in Rising from the Ashes, his 2005 autobiography, written with Simon Wilde.

“There came a time when I would have given back all my Test runs and Test caps to be happy again,” he wrote. “God knows how many lonely, anxious nights I spent in hotel rooms in strange cities preparing for the next day’s Test match. I looked at cricket and reflected that the game had done me over. I’d dedicated too much of my life to it and it had bitten me on the arse.

“Having sunk to a place from which I thought I would never pick myself up, after my depression and traumatic divorce and the drinking, I’m more careful now. When you’ve been hit by a juggernaut, you tend to look left and right.” 

Sometimes, the juggernaut feels like the only way out.