Our Athletes Voice series gives athletes a forum to talk about how technology has impacted their careers and their lives away from the games. This week, former NHL forward Theo Fleury, 51, opens about his addiction and mental health struggles, why he’s advocating for suicide prevention, and his partnership with an app that has the potential to save lives.
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Theo Fleury won a Stanley Cup with the Calgary Flames and scored 455 goals over 13 NHL seasons. He also won a gold medal with Canada at the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City. But he struggled with drug and alcohol addiction throughout his career, and a suspension for violating the NHL’s substance abuse policy essentially ended his pro career in 2003. Soon afterward, Fleury nearly killed himself.
“At 2 a.m., I reached over, picked up the gun, loaded it, flipped the safety off and put the barrel in my mouth with my finger shaky on the trigger,” Fleury wrote in his 2009 autobiography, Playing with Fire. “I sat there forever, shivering so hard the barrel was bouncing off my teeth. How did it taste? It tasted lonely. Cold, lonely and black.”
The CDC reports that close to 45,000 Americans died by suicide in 2016, and that rates of suicide have risen in almost every state since 1999. More than half of the people who killed themselves had no diagnosed mental health condition (but often there are warning signs).
In his book, Fleury alleged that a youth hockey coach, Graham James, had sexually abused him as a teenager. James had plead guilty to sexual abuse charges filed by two other players in 1997 and later pleaded guilty to charges filed by Fleury and his cousin in 2011.
The experience of opening up about what had happened to him—and the positive feedback he received from other survivors of abuse—prompted Fleury to start advocating for mental health. Fleury recently partnered with iRel8, a mental health support app, to create a forum for him to talk with the platform’s anonymous users.
Sharing His Struggles…
“It wasn’t hard at all [to go public]. I was sick and tired of being sick and tired. The one thing that I hadn’t done was get honest and truthful about what happened. And the reaction that I got was people started coming up to me and telling me, ‘Hey, I read your book, and you told my story. Me too.’ That right there was the catalyst for me to say, ‘Hey, this is what I was meant to do. This is the true purpose for my life, to help as many people get to where they need to go.’ ”
“Those of us who suffer mental illness, we’re in the majority, not in the minority. There are more people who experience mental illness than don’t. The message is that we have this one-in-five label out there, but really it’s five-in-five. Everybody, at some point in their life, is going to struggle with some sort of mental struggle where they’re depressed, they’re anxious, or whatever it is. So I feel it’s really important that there are spaces—safe spaces, like iRel8—to allow each individual to talk about what’s going on without judgment, without embarrassment or whatever it is that people feel that’s holding them back from getting well.
“I think if you interviewed anybody, eventually you would get to that place where [they’d say], ‘Yeah, I have struggled with certain things in my life.’ That’s what I’ve really discovered. When you are vulnerable and are willing to talk about your own experience, what happens is that people open up themselves because they’ve never been able to find that safe place to be able to talk about what’s going on.”
The Suicide Paradox…
“Here’s the deal, and this is the million-dollar question that needs to be answered. We have the highest awareness in the history of our planet around mental illness. But, on the other side of the coin, we have the highest suicide rates in the history of our planet. So, why isn’t this awareness being turned into action and getting people well?
“Because nobody is providing solutions other than, ‘Go see a psychiatrist and he’s going to prescribe to you synthetic brain chemistry’ when he actually has not taken a sample or you haven’t been put in an MRI machine, so that they can see actually what is working and what is not working in the brain. They give us this magic pill, and they send you out into the world, basically on a trial-and-error process, which is ridiculous.
“I’ve been down that road, and I’ve been down that route. And I had a gun in my mouth, ready to blow my brains out. It wasn’t until I discovered that there are holistic practices, which can help me live my life one day at a time with joy and happiness and peace and all these amazing things.”
A Social Solution…
“I met iRel8 through a group out of New York called We’re All a Little ‘Crazy,’ which is a global mental health organization. Eric Kussin is the founder of [We’re All a Little ‘Crazy’], and he reached out to me via social media and obviously knew that I was already in this space and had been in this space for a long time. He shared his story with me.
“I really like the holistic approach to mental health as opposed to the Big Pharma approach to mental health. At our one-year anniversary of our group, I met the guys from iRel8 and had an amazing conversation about what they were doing. I love the aspect of group therapy and people sharing their stories with other people—and that it’s available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It’s an amazing tool that I hadn’t seen from anybody in the space—I’ve been involved in this for about 10 years now.
“People are looking for solutions to feel better and techniques and all that stuff. It’s very easily shareable in that space. Of all the therapies and remedies out there, probably the most effective type of therapy that I’ve come across is group therapy. The iRel8 platform is a group therapy platform where you can log on anonymously, and there’s no fear of being [outed]. We are just sharing our stories with one another and creating a safe space and a safe environment to heal.
“I’m very grateful and thankful that I’ve run into a lot of like-minded people who are engaged in the solution and not really labels. The more I’m around this, the more I’m finding these amazing people with their own stories of struggle who have overcome [it]. I think essentially that’s what it’s all about.”
Life After Hockey…
“I actually wanted to get as far way from the game as I possibly could because I felt that I could have a bigger impact doing this work than I ever did playing hockey. I don’t believe in coincidences. I believe in ‘everything happens for a reason.’ There was a reason why I sat down and wrote the book. And what’s come out of it is I’m involved in the biggest epidemic on the planet. I’ve been able to find a way to manage my own illness and, by doing that, I have on-the-ground experience where I can have a very large impact on the mental wellness scope of how many people struggle with this illness.
“Hockey is something that I used to do. This is more a societal issue than it is an individual sport, so the same stigmas that are attached to sport are the same stigmas that are attached in the general population. Do we have a long ways to go? Yeah, we have a long ways to go. We, as athletes, get put on this pedestal where we shouldn’t suffer from any sort of mental health struggles because we have money, we have fame, we have fortune, we have all this stuff. But at the end of the day that means nothing.”
If you are contemplating suicide or self-harm, please know that you are not alone and there is help. Reach out via the iRel8 platform or call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255.
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New Athletes Voice stories appear earlier in our newsletter, which you can subscribe to here.
Read more in our ongoing Athletes Voice series…
- Tim Anselimo Survived a Mass Shooting to Return to the NBA 2K League
- Chris Geiler Believes Data Can Save Lives in Skydiving
- Joshua Dobbs Balances Pro Football Career with Aerospace Aspirations
- Kai Lenny Wants to Protect the Monster Waves He Rides
- Meghan O’Leary Went From Google Search to Olympian in Six Years
Question? Comment? Story idea? Let us know at talkback@sporttechie.com