When Carleton men’s hockey player Fabian Walsh first heard about Bench the Barriers, he jumped at the chance to share his story.
Bench the Barriers is an organization that aims to raise awareness about mental health struggles within the student-athlete community, according to co-founder and former Ravens soccer player Andrew Latty. The organization was started in 2013.
In a post published on the organization’s website, the fifth-year MBA student described his mental health issues that came up during his final year playing at Dalhousie University in 2016-17.
“I went through a year-long phase of my life where it was some dark and tough times and ended up having to go see professional help,” Walsh said. “I essentially suffered a loss and wasn’t really dealing with it appropriately or properly.”
Walsh said that his mental health issues stemmed from the loss he suffered and his parents’ divorce when he was 12-13 years old.
“Dealing with the mental health issues, the fact that it was creeping into every aspect of my life. I could never really get away from it, and I had never really experienced that before,” he said. “Hockey was always a place I could go to get away from everything—whether it’d be family issues or issues at school.”
However, that wasn’t the case for him then.
“When I started really realizing there was a problem was when it was starting to creep into my hockey life and my school life. You find it very hard to focus on assignments or exams. The biggest thing really is, it’s very hard to find motivation to study or to write that paper because that’s not important to you at that moment,” he said. “You’re consumed by the negative that’s going on in your life.”
The turning point for Walsh was when he sought out professional help, prompted by his parents. He said he hadn’t opened up about his struggles to his family before then.
“It had been building up over time and it eventually, it was kind of like a powder keg—it was going to explode eventually,” he said.
Walsh said that part of why it took him so long to seek help was the fact that he had played high level junior hockey throughout his life.
“[Student athletes] are supposed to be mentally strong and tough and [that’s] probably why it took so long for things to blow up for me was because I was internalizing things, and not going to get the help that I needed or ‘acting tough’ so to speak,” he said. “The strongest people and the toughest people are the ones that are able to realize that they have a problem and to go and get that help.”
Walsh said he feels that his experience with mental health issues has made him a stronger person.
“I learned a ton about myself. Things that I didn’t know. I was kind of straying away from the person I wanted to be, and I did a ton of soul searching throughout this experience. It really allowed me the opportunity of being the person I do want to be and the person that I’m comfortable with,” Walsh said.
Walsh pointed out that while he wasn’t educated or aware of mental health growing up, he has seen a lot of increased awareness in recent years, especially among the other members of the Ravens hockey team.
“I know that if that were to happen, whoever it would happen to would probably see it’s okay to share that with the guys,” he said. “Things are very good in the dressing room and I had a very good dressing room at [Dalhousie] as well and a lot of guys I could come forward to.”
Despite the progress made, Walsh said stereotypes about athletes needing to be tough are the biggest barrier to athletes opening up and seeking help for mental health issues.
“I think because people see us competing and . . . they think that we’re tougher in general, and I don’t think that’s necessarily true or untrue to be honest,” he said.
According to Walsh, people should not be ashamed to reach out for help.
“The mind is a very powerful thing, and I think sometimes, we lose control of it and we need help. The saddest thing in the world is people who think they’re all alone and feel like they have to take their lives or hurt themselves,” he said. “When you go through it and then you come out on top, it’s a very rewarding feeling. It’s something that we really need to be aware of.”
Walsh said he is grateful to his parents for listening and helping him turn his life around when he reached out to them.
“When I was first going through my struggles, calling [my mom] and my dad every night and crying,” Walsh recalled, “they were kind of pushing me to get some help and I didn’t really want to get help, but then one day, my mom said something that kind of stuck with me: ‘Well, Fabian. What do you do if you break your arm, you go seek a doctor, right? It’s the same kind of thing. If you break your mind, so to speak, you go see a doctor and get help.’ I think we have to treat those things the same way.”
Photo by Dan Robertson
