Cleveland Cavaliers forward Kevin Love opened up Tuesday about a panic attack he suffered during a game earlier this season and the importance of talking about mental health in sports.
In a first-person essay for The Players' Tribune, Love wrote that he left a game against the Atlanta Hawks on Nov. 5 shortly after halftime, abruptly running to the locker room with his heart uncontrollably racing. He wrote he ended up on the floor of the training room, trying to catch his breath and understand what had happened.
"It came out of nowhere. I’d never had one before. I didn’t even know if they were real," Love wrote. "But it was real — as real a broken hand or a sprained ankle. Since that day, almost everything about the way I think about my mental health has changed."
A five-time All-Star and former first-round draft pick, Love wrote that he has started seeing a therapist and is confronting pent-up grief about the death of his grandmother. The panic attack, he explained, altered his perspective on mental health, something he had "thought about ... as someone else's problem" throughout his life to that point.
Love wrote that he was inspired to open up about his issues after Toronto Raptors guard DeMar DeRozan recently discussed the same subject. DeRozan told The Toronto Star late last month that he deals with depression and anxiety.
"Just by sharing what he shared, DeMar probably helped some people — and maybe a lot more people than we know — feel like they aren’t crazy or weird to be struggling with depression," Love wrote. "His comments helped take some power away from that stigma, and I think that’s where the hope is."
