It is a difficult thing for a professional athlete to be able to do, especially in real time, Dooling says.
"From my experience as a player, in order to make it to the apex in sports, you have to be almost flawless and perfect at every intersection," he said. "We're trained to just shut up and play. We're trained to not process and talk about our emotions, how we feel. The environment we come from. We don't process things. We internalize a lot. Our body acts out on us. It comes out in the form of anxiety, PTSD. A lot of people will self-care for the symptoms but they won't deal with the core issues. You have to do therapy. You have to make sure you have a great support system. There are a lot of variables you have to have to have total wellness."
Dooling will report to the new Director of Mental Health and Wellness, serving as liaison between players and the program resources.
"I can respond and I'm still pretty relevant," Dooling said. "I played against most of these guys. They see a safety net in me. I'll be providing them with support and resources. We'll be able to respond in real time, not only doing preventative stuff, but infrastructure that will outlive all of us … in 20 years, this program will be further advanced than it is now. It will be able to help not only ballplayers but society in general. If we start taking it seriously, society will follow that. We have the capacity to scale our model. The most important thing is to get that director in place so we can grow organically."
Others disclose mental wellness issues
So many players in recent years have acknowledged they were dealing with mental health issues while playing: Metta World Peace, Delonte West, the late Eddie Griffin, Larry Sanders, White, former WNBA star Chamique Holdsclaw and Hall of Famer Jerry West. And now, in the last few weeks, so have DeRozan and Love, along with the Washington Wizards' Kelly Oubre, who told NBCSportsWashington.com last week that he also has dealt with anxiety.
In The Players' Tribune story, Love detailed a panic attack he suffered Nov. 5 in a game against Atlanta. He said he was already "stressed" with family problems. After not feeling right throughout the first half, Love said everything "hit the fan" early in the third quarter.
1:28 "Coach (Tyronn) Lue called a timeout in the third quarter," Love wrote. "When I got to the bench, I felt my heart racing faster than usual. Then I was having trouble catching my breath. It's hard to describe, but everything was spinning, like my brain was trying to climb out of my head. The air felt thick and heavy. My mouth was like chalk. I remember our assistant coach yelling something about a defensive set. I nodded, but I didn't hear much of what he said. By that point, I was freaking out. When I got up to walk out of the huddle, I knew I couldn't reenter the game -- like, literally couldn't do it physically."
Love said Lue came up to him during the timeout, but he ran past him into the Cavs' locker room.
"I was running from room to room, like I was looking for something I couldn't find," Love wrote. "Really I was just hoping my heart would stop racing. It was like my body was trying to say to me, You're about to die. I ended up on the floor in the training room, lying on my back, trying to get enough air to breathe."
This came after DeRozan acknowledged that a tweet he sent out the morning of the All-Star Game -- "this depression get the best of me" -- was far more than his quoting Kevin Gates' song "Tomorrow." DeRozan's battles with depression, a condition that was exacerbated in recent months by the illness of his father, Frank, who's been in an L.A. hospital with serious medical issues.
"Honestly, the response, I can honestly say that I wouldn't have even thought how the response, how it came out, I wouldn't have thought I'd ever gotten anything like that," DeRozan told me recently. "Especially me. I've never been one who wanted any type of attention, good nor bad. The response I got from people was so uplifting, positive, refreshing. It's crazy. It's crazy. But it made me feel good. You just look at certain things. People say 'you helped me. Because if you're going through something like this, I can get through it.' It's incredible. By far one of the most incredible things in my career that I've witnessed outside of basketball."
1:43 The National Institute of Health's National Institute of Mental Health estimates that, in 2016, more than 44 million Americans suffered from some form of mental illness, ranging from mild to moderate to severe, and impacting more than 18 percent of all U.S. adults.
Of that 44.7 million, all with what NIMH calls AMI -- Any Mental Illness, defined as a mental, behavioral or emotional disorder -- 10.4 million had a Serious Mental Illness (SMI), defined as "a mental, behavioral, or emotional disorder resulting in serious functional impairment, which substantially interferes with or limits one or more major life activities."
Title I of the Americans With Disabilities Act, passed in 1990 and which bars discrimination against individuals with mental health issues, requires an employer to provide what the Act calls "Reasonable Accomodation" to qualified individuals with disabilities, "unless to do so would cause undue hardship." Reasonable Accomodation, according to the ADA, should allow the employee to "perform the essential functions of the position."
ADA cites as an example a cleaning company that rotates its staff to different floors of a building on a monthly basis.
"One crew member has a psychiatric disability," the ADA example continues. "While his mental illness does not affect his ability to perform the various cleaning functions, it does make it difficult to adjust to alterations in his daily routine. The employee has had significant difficulty adjusting to the monthly changes in floor assignments. He asks for a reasonable accommodation and proposes three options: staying on one floor permanently, staying on one floor for two months and then rotating, or allowing a transition period to adjust to a change in floor assignments. These accommodations are reasonable because they appear to be feasible solutions to this employee's problems dealing with changes to his routine. They also appear to be effective because they would enable him to perform his cleaning duties."
Whether Reasonable Accommodation will be a part of the new NBA/NBPA program is also uncertain.
Critical next steps loom for players, teams
For years, the NBA left decisions about players' fitness to play in games while dealing with mental wellness issues to the individual team's physicians, many of whom were not experts in mental health. The Dallas Mavericks were the first team, in 2000, to employ a full-time psychologist, Dr. Don Kalkstein, as the Director of Sport Psychology/Mental Skills. But now, many teams do.
The Indiana Pacers, for example, hired Dr. Chris Carr as their Team Performance Psychologist in 2011. He has an office at the team's practice facility, and frequently travels with the team on the road.
"I think he's a tremendous resource for all our guys," Pacers GM Kevin Pritchard said Sunday. "At some level, everybody uses him for a sounding board, some deeper than others. We give our players full access. We talked about it early, and our players feel like it's important, too. Not only do we give them the resource, but they have to use it."
Pritchard says the team is not privy to the details of conversations Carr has with team employees -- which are not limited to the players.
"We all want to have a stake in our players' health and wellness. We don't look at them as just players; we look at them as human beings. We want to help not only our players, but our coaches, everybody. Dr. Carr is not just with the players. He helps us all communicate better."
But the issue of who decides the best course of action for a player -- program director, or team, or some combination of both in conjunction with the player -- is still a salient one.
Teams don't even know, by way of contrast, if one of their players is in the league's Drugs of Abuse program, until after the player fails multiple drug tests or doesn't comply with a mandated treatment program. The medical director of the program is the only person with that information; once it's determined a player isn't in compliance, he can be suspended or, ultimately, terminated from the league.
But there is no arguing with the medical director, unless the player can provide "clear and convincing" evidence, per cap expert Larry Coon's invaluable FAQ, to the league's grievance arbitrator that he was not at fault or negligent for the presence of a drug of abuse or sports enhancing drug. (The grievance arbitrator has the authority to reduce or rescind the player's penalty.) The player could argue, for example, that he didn't know or suspect he was taking a banned substance.
What is clear is that the new program will be run independently of the teams, league and union.
"We don't want players to be discouraged from getting help when they need it because they're concerned that it will get back to the team, or it may affect their play, or it may affect their next contract," NBPA Executive Director Michele Roberts told SB Nation's Paul Flannery in an interview last month.
Yet even that can be debated when it comes to wellness.
What role should transparency play?
White is one of 6.8 million adults (3.1 percent of the U.S. population), according to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, who lives with GAD. People with GAD, according to the ADAA, "may anticipate disaster and may be overly concerned about money, health, family, work, or other issues. Individuals with GAD find it difficult to control their w
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