Here is the full transcript of Victoria Garrick’s talk titled “Athletes and Mental Health: The Hidden Opponent” at TEDxUSC conference.
In this TEDx talk, Victoria Garrick addresses the significant yet often overlooked issue of mental health struggles among athletes. She highlights the societal tendency to prioritize physical injuries over psychological struggles, pointing out the disparity in how each is treated and perceived.
Garrick shares her personal experiences as a student-athlete dealing with depression and anxiety, emphasizing the challenges of admitting to mental health issues in a competitive environment. She criticizes the NCAA for not conducting frequent or detailed enough surveys to truly understand the scope of mental health issues among athletes. Through her own survey of Division I athletes, Garrick reveals alarming statistics on depression, anxiety, and the fear of seeking help.
She calls for a societal shift to destigmatize mental health issues, advocating for greater support, resources, and understanding for athletes. Garrick’s powerful message underscores the urgent need for change and the importance of acknowledging and addressing mental health as a critical component of athletes’ well-being.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
The Challenge of Balancing Athletics and Academics
You have to be at a team lift at 6 a.m., but you’re accidentally one minute late because you slept through your alarm. Your heart’s pounding from sprinting to the gym, but nobody cares that it’s because you were up until 2 a.m. studying for an exam that you still don’t feel prepared for. You can feel the tension between you and your teammates, who now have to run sprints tomorrow at 6 a.m. because you were one minute late. You start the lift, and your mind’s just not in the right place, but it doesn’t matter. You have to lift.
And as soon as it’s over, you scarf down breakfast on your way to 8 a.m. class, and you get there. And your hair’s still wet because you didn’t have time to dry it. The professor looks at you and says, “Where’s the homework assignment?” But you forgot it. How could you forget it? You were supposed to be on top of everything, so you sit there, and you worry about what else you might have forgotten.
And at noon, you get a 30-minute break, but it’s not really a break because you use it to quickly make up an assignment you missed for last week’s game. And soon, it’s 12:10. And to you, 40 minutes does not feel like enough time to get on the court and be ready, even though it actually is. So, you head over, and at 1, practice is starting. And you have to forget everything that happened in your day because at practice, you have to perform.
You can’t not perform. There’s someone better than you, someone competing with you, and someone in high school who just committed to be you. So forget the zero on your assignment. Forget the test you’re not prepared for. Forget the friends you haven’t seen in weeks. Forget the argument you’ve been in with your parents. Play well, pass well, perform.
The Emotional Toll of High Expectations
And when it’s finally over, you find yourself staring in the locker room mirror trying not to cry. And you ask yourself, “Is this how I’m supposed to feel?” My name is Victoria Garrick, and I play volleyball here at USC. I’ve been playing sports my whole life, but never quite like this.
Now in high school, I didn’t understand mental illness. And usually, when people say “mental illness,” you know, people tense up because talking about it is uncomfortable. You might think, “Oh, I’ve heard this before,” or “This doesn’t affect me.” Those are common thoughts to have, I know, because I used to think the same thing.
I thought, “You know, depression means you have serious family issues or, you know, you’re born with anxiety.” I just didn’t get it because it’s hard to understand something you can’t see or touch. So when I got to college and began my career as a Division I athlete, I never thought I would struggle with these issues.
Now, I can’t be the only athlete here. We definitely probably have some Soul Cyclers, some neighborhood joggers. So if you’ve ever, you know, had an injury, torn a ligament, sprained an ankle, I just want you to raise your hand. All right, awesome, that’s like most of the room, it’s pretty common. Now, I want you to raise your hand if you’ve ever had depression or anxiety. You can put your hands down.
Confronting the Stigma of Mental Health in Athletics
Did you feel almost that tension or like that awkwardness we just created together? Did you maybe judge someone who raised their hand, or were you afraid to raise your own hand because of what people might think? One in four people suffer from a mental health issue, which is 25% of this room right now. What we just experienced together was a room full of people stigmatizing mental health.
Dr. Jeffrey Lieberman defines stigma as dishonor or disgrace. He says it’s like the Scarlet A that Hester Prynne is forced to wear or the mark on Cain in the Bible. It’s this label that outcasts you from everyone else. We stigmatize mental health in the same way, and that’s a societal issue that needs to change.
And while anyone can experience a mental health issue, today I’m going to talk about mental health, specifically in athletes, because I have faced anxiety and depression through my experiences as an athlete. So let me tell you a little bit about me. When I first got to the USC volleyball team, I was overjoyed. Let me preface this by saying I was not a top recruit, okay? I was not called by tons of Division I schools, but USC was my dream scenario, and I wanted it so bad. And I knew I was good enough despite what anyone else told me.
So I emailed these coaches every day, I called them every week, I went in for extra reps in high school, I sent them videos, I called again until they were like, “Okay, you can walk on, just stop contacting us.” So eventually, I got my spot. But still, these USC coaches did not think I would play one point.
But I had this fire, this zest for competition, and I didn’t care that I didn’t have the accolades that the other girls did, so I kept working hard. Against all odds, my freshman season, I started and played in every single Pac-12 match, and we won the championship. That’s me on the left right there.
And what happened was, there was this girl who wasn’t supposed to do anything, who now has a role on what at the time was the number one team in the nation. Mentally, I started on this high, right, because I was living my dream. But all of a sudden, I began to feel differently. I became anxious, more anxious than I’d ever felt before. I had five alarms to make sure I was never late, but I never even used the five alarms because I woke up at 7:15 anyways due to my anxiety over being late.
And I worried about my athletic performance constantly. On game days, I worried, “What if I don’t play well tonight?” “What if the coaches bench me? What if my passing sucks? What if I didn’t study the scout enough?” There were times I would feel this knot in my stomach, and my skin started to crawl, and my hands started to shake, and I as well with tears because I was so afraid to play and make a mistake. Because at an elite level, mistakes are costly. And on top of it, I had school and exams and family and a social life, and I couldn’t handle everything coming at me so fast and just piling up at one time.
The Overwhelming Schedule of a Student-Athlete
I want to take a second, though, to show you guys how this happened to me because, to be ironic, it is easier to understand something when you can see it. So, we’re going to look at a typical week in my life. I’m going to disclaimer, this wasn’t intended to be funny, but as I wrote my talk, I realized how much of a joke my schedule is, so I had some fun with it. So if you like to make light of a tragic situation like me, you’re going to enjoy this. If not, bear with me. I have 16 units of class.
Let’s add a nice fat five-hour practice block. Then I have required tutoring. Maybe time to eat, because I’m a human who does that sometimes. Also, I need office hours, probably with a professor who thinks his class is the only thing I have to do in my life. Then I have an exam, which I probably only know 20% of, so I’m going to block out time to study and really master that 20%.
On top of all my other homework, and oops, maybe I have 6 a.m. running because my teammate is going through the same stuff I am, and she was late one day, but don’t forget, games on Friday and Sunday out of state, so now I’m missing these days of class for travel.
Secretly, I’m kind of excited I’m missing class, but the logical part of me is like, “When am I going to find the time to make up that work?” because pre-game warm-up starts not one, not two, not three, but a whopping four hours before the game. So if you thought I’d have time to make it up, I actually don’t, and then it all restarts when I hop off my plane bright and early to do it all again. And in the little time I have left, I like to cry in misery. I wish I was kidding, but if you look at the schedule in all seriousness, you can see how this can overpower anyone, it can overpower one of you.
All of a sudden, I was thinking about what I have to do next, what I can’t be late for, what I can’t miss, what could go wrong, and it just kind of drove me off the wall. And because I didn’t think I could have any of these illnesses because I was an athlete, I battled depression for half a year without even knowing I was. When I first became really unhappy, it was in August, and I didn’t know how to describe it.
The Daily Struggle of a Student-Athlete
Every morning I woke up, I immediately despised the day. I didn’t have the energy, I didn’t want to go anywhere, I didn’t want to see anyone or do anything. At practice, I just went through the motions. I woke up, went to the practice block for five hours, and then went to sleep, and I did that again, and again, and again. I was just depleted, completely and utterly drained. And do you know how much energy it takes day in and day out to not even succeed, but just get by as a student-athlete?
It’s exhausting, and I told myself, “You can’t feel this way, Victoria. You have nothing to feel sad about; you’re starting, you have a great family, you have good friends.” And I was confused because I was known to always be the most energetic, the most bubbly and talkative, and always happy. So I said, “Put on this face and just fake it,” but after a while, I couldn’t fake it. I began to see a psychologist once a week, and that was weird. Being honest, the first time I walked into the waiting room, I was like, “Oh my God, I’m one of those people now. I have a therapist.”
You imagine, there goes that voice stigmatizing mental health, like, “Therapy for weirdos.” I thought I’d walk in, and there’d be this big yellow couch, and this box of tissues, and they’d say, “Tell me your darkest secrets,” but it’s not like that. It was actually very helpful. So after a while of seeing her, she suggested I try medicine, antidepressants, and I was immediately like, “What?”
It’s like when you’ve been dating someone for a while, and they say, “I want you to meet my parents,” and you’re like, “This is too serious now,” so naturally, I refused the meds. But of course, my depression worsened. I realized it wasn’t something I could just eat a tub of ice cream over, cry, and be fine the next day. The neurochemicals in my brain were literally not producing the way they once were, and my serotonin levels were no longer high enough to keep my mood where it once was.
What I used to not be able to describe, I could now formulate into words. I had this dark cloud over my head, and it followed me everywhere. It was there when I woke up, it was there when I went to sleep. It was there in practice, every day, passing balls. And do you know how hard that is, when you have to be good at your craft every single day, and all you want to do is lay into a ball and just cry?
I remember times during water breaks, I would run to the bathroom and just sob, because for five seconds, I wanted my day to stop. I never got to a point of self-harm, fortunately, and I never put myself in actual danger, but I can remember a few times that I was biking, and I thought, “You know, if this car accidentally hit me, that would stop my week. That would give me the break I so badly need.” I want to show you some pictures that I posted during this time in my life. What do we think of these?
The Illusion of Happiness on Social Media
Just look at them. Here I am with my friends at the party. There we are, looking cute and Christmassy. Over to the right, we’re celebrating. I look happy, right? Because no one posts what they don’t want you to see. This photo on the left, I was at that party for probably 20 minutes before I was so overwhelmed with all the people around me, that I snuck out the back and went home alone.
And when my friend in the picture texted me and said, “Hey, where did you go?” I lied, said I ran into someone. The photo in the middle, we took like 50 pictures that night to find one that I deemed pretty enough to post on my Instagram, completely staged. And the one on the right, I spent that night crying. I was trying so hard to portray this life that I so badly felt I needed to have.
The Pressure to Achieve
And this is a problem with so many people my age, not just because of depression, but because our culture has created this belief that we need to be achieving all the time in order to be happy, right? Look what internships she got. Look what trip he went on. It doesn’t stop, this constant scrolling of people who look like they’re doing so, so well, that you sit back and say to yourself, “Well, what am I doing? What do I look like?”
Why don’t I look like her? It’s this flawed notion that says you need to be achieving to be happy and be valued. “If I’m on the USC volleyball team, I’ll be valued. If I get this job, I’ll be happy.” At this point, you’re probably thinking, “Why don’t you quit? I’m not on scholarship. I could just quit. Why don’t I just stop doing that?”
The Resolve to Continue
I don’t quit because volleyball is who I am. It’s not a hobby or something I do on the side. It’s my life, like most athletes, and what that means is I have to learn how to manage my lifestyle because I have two more years left, and you better bet I want to win a championship. I have major depressive disorder, single episode with anxious features. I see my therapist now, I take medicine, I practice positive thinking.
I try to be authentic on social media and to people, but the biggest thing that stood with me is I sat back and assessed it all, and I thought, “Why?” Why did it take me so long to acknowledge and accept my illness? I realized the culture that we live in as athletes does not make it easy for us to honor this. If you think about it, the culture of athletics preaches, “Where there’s a will, there’s a way. The best don’t rest unless you puke, faint, or die. Keep going.”
The Stigma in Athletics
Mental illness is associated with weakness. To appear weak is the last thing an athlete wants, and we’re always hearing about the grind, right? It’s about the grind. Even if you’re not an athlete, I mean, you’ve heard about the grind. To me, it means when you just feel like you can’t do something, but you do it.
When your thighs are burning and you’re sweating bullets, you run one more sprint. When it’s the fifth set and you just feel like you can’t do it anymore, but you go dig ten more balls. Like, that’s the grind, but being a part of this culture makes it so hard for athletes to differentiate between what is hard work and what is pushing yourself too far. What happens when this push through your workout becomes a push through a conversation, a push through a day, and all of a sudden, a push through your life?
I know what the grind is. I’ve started on this team for two years, competing with girls who were supposed to blow me out of the gym, and that’s why it was so hard for me to honor what I was going through. I was in practice thinking, “I don’t want to be here today. I just want to go home and rest,” and I said, “Victoria, the girl to your left, she’s here. She’s working hard. She must want it more than you. You don’t deserve to be here if you’re not going to work hard.”
I told myself I was weak for wanting a break, and this is so true across all athletes because the stigma makes it so hard for us to come forward. Did you know that Serena Williams and Terry Bradshaw have had depression? Serena Williams, she’s a legend, okay? She’s been the world’s number one female tennis player seven different times, and even someone like her can struggle with these issues, but that’s just stuff people aren’t realizing.
Changing Perspectives on Mental Health and Athletics
Let’s look at concussions, for example. In 1933, the NCAA’s medical handbook said concussions shouldn’t be regarded too lightly. In 1952, the New England Journal of Medicine said players who’ve suffered multiple concussions should stop playing football. Not until 70 years later, in 2009, did the NFL even acknowledge publicly that concussions can have long-lasting effects on players.
So we’re looking at something here where 20 years ago, nobody cared. Nobody cared about concussions. You’d think, “Yeah, banging your head together, probably not safe.” No. Players were told, “Tough it out if your head hurts.” The way we’re treating mental illness today is so similar to the way we treated concussions 20 years ago. “Oh, this athlete’s feeling depressed? Sleep it off. Oh, that athlete’s having an anxiety attack? Tell them to calm down.”
The Need for Societal Change in Mental Health Perception
We need to make a change societally to make people care this much about mental health, because I’ll tell you this. Right now, a physical injury is treated more seriously than a psychological injury, and that needs to change. I could easily get the day off for a physical injury, right, because I’m limping. You can see my ankle swelling.
But for an athlete to say, “I’ve been feeling depressed this week,” or “I’ve had insomnia because of my anxiety,” you’re just looked down upon. And at this level, no one wants to miss practice. I mean, that sets me behind the competition, behind on my team. But when the trainer can see you’re injured, they make you sit out, because they can see your physical health is at stake.
But when no one can see your mental health, it’s just up to you to decide. There’s someone like me who hates not being there. My team will tell you this. I hate not being there when they’re sprinting without me, and I’m injured.
It kills me. So for me to walk up to them and say, “I have a completely uninjured body, and you can’t see it, but I’m not well, and I need to rest today,” is so hard to do. And with everything I’ve been through, I’ve only done that once. I’m here today for a greater population, a silent population of athletes who think they’ll be viewed as lesser, doesn’t have the courage to come forward, or doesn’t know that they can be a strong, competitive, elite athlete and have a mental health issue.
The NCAA Survey and Its Implications
In 2015, the NCAA conducted a survey. They found that out of 2,100 athletes, 30% reported they were intractably overwhelmed. On depression and anxiety, they said they’ve seen a general increase. This is two years old.
This should be recorded every season, if not every year, and they do not even give us numbers on depression and anxiety, and this is the most recent survey the NCAA has done. It infuriates me that something so serious is being so clearly disregarded. I did my own survey to show you guys that this is an epidemic. I surveyed 100 men and women from Division I schools like Stanford, Oregon, Washington, UCLA, you name it, and this is what I found.
When asked if they’d ever experienced symptoms of depression or anxiety, 69% said yes. The statistic I gave you in the beginning was 25%. When asked if they think the amount of time they need to spend on their sport is too much, more than half said yes, almost at 90%, and the next one honestly devastated me when the results came in, and it kept me up for a few days. I asked them, “Have you ever felt you experienced anxiety, depression, or an eating disorder, but were too afraid to tell anyone?”
More than half. That means those athletes today are somewhere, and no one knows that they’re struggling. About 80% agree with me that this topic is neglected throughout society. My university gives me free medicine and free therapy, and for that, I am so grateful, but so many other athletes like me don’t get that opportunity because this issue is underrated, and they don’t have the funds.
The Way Forward for Athlete Mental Health
Due to the extreme time demands and the pressure that we athletes feel, we need to make, we need to just be very aware of how athletes are feeling across the country and consistently be evaluating them, and athletes need to be aware of their mental health so that they can learn how to manage this lifestyle. I love my team. They are special girls, and I love the sport of volleyball, that’s why I can’t let it go. But as I continue my next two years, I hope that I hear this conversation get louder.
I hope mental health stops being stigmatized for all people, and I hope that one day a person like me can get on this stage, ask a question about mental health, and no one will think twice about raising their hand. Thank you.