Indian Express: Achilles’ Mind: Simon Orchard’s struggle with anxiety disorders, paranoia

By Mihir Vasavda

A few sportspersons, supreme physical athletes, can also be held back by vulnerable minds.

Australia’s Hockey World League semifinals match is still a couple of hours away. Simon Orchard is relaxing in his hotel room, lost in thought, lying on his bed. He glances out of the window, smiles as he thinks of the couple of occasions when he and his teammate Tristian White had sneaked out of the tiny outlet and clambered up to the roof.
Just then, a random thought came to him: “What would happen if I jumped off that?”

Orchard freaked out. He rushed to team psychologist Catherine Campbell, knowing he needed help. “It wasn’t a suicidal thing. I didn’t want to jump. But the fact the thought entered my head, the head of a noted anxiety sufferer, set me into a real tailspin. It scared the shit out of me,” Orchard says.

Not surprisingly, he could hardly focus on the match later that evening. The thought replayed over and over in his mind and Orchard, one of the senior-most players in the Australian squad, broke down. The 29-year-old has been suffering from anxiety issues for quite some time (“ever since I moved away from home to Perth in 2007”). But this was the final straw. He decided to take a break from competitive hockey, realising he needed therapy to improve his condition.

Orchard describes the incident at the team hotel in Raipur, where the setting is eerily similar to the one in Antwerp. The recently-concluded World League Finals was his first tournament since returning from therapy. He sits on the edge of the bed and glances out of the window. The thought of harming himself, however, doesn’t cross his mind.

Five months have passed since that ‘scary’ Antwerp afternoon. During this phase, he has undergone intense therapy and as a part of it, Orchard put his experiences into a powerful blog piece recently. It revealed the magnitude of health anxiety he endured, which began with inexplicable chest pains in 2007, shortly after he joined the famous Australian Institute of Sport in Perth. It continued years later when a growth on his neck convinced him he was going to die from lymphoma. In between all this, frequent training field bust-ups with teammates and other disagreements filled his mind with dread.

Orchard’s experience is a window into how elite sports environments can create or worsen mental health issues. “Next week, our team for the Olympics will be decided. There’s so much on the line. Come the Olympic Games next year… people’s hopes and dreams can be dashed with a mis-trap or a slip. There’s enormous pressure,” Orchard says. Especially if you’re a part of an Australia’s all-conquering squad, where only the best are accepted. And sometimes, even that may not be enough.

Competitive Australian set-up

The acrid smell of sweat hangs heavy in the lobby of Australia’s team hotel. Shoes are stacked in rows outside the doors of every room along with sweat-soaked t-shirts, which are left hanging to dry. They emit a strong odour, which a member of their support staff cheesily describes as the ‘fragrance of hard work’.

The atmosphere is also a constant reminder of a set-up that is striving to achieve excellence; a team where mediocrity is mocked. Such is the intensity within the group that even during recreational sessions, where they indulge in a game of cricket or footy, they want to win. Add to that the burden of expectations players face from their colleagues in a team sport. For a player, the sensation of individual failure in a successful changing room can be excruciating. “Professional sport is around 60 percent psychological and 40 pc about skills and other things,” Australia captain Mark Knowles says. “If you control the mind off field, you will be able to control the ball on it.”

Orchard’s condition was never about his ability, or about the insecurity over his position in the team. Instead, it stemmed from relationships with coaches and teammates. “You’re fighting the guy next to you who is your best mate, but at the same time is your rival for a spot in the team. Then you’re at training under Ric Charlesworth. He is the best coach I’ve ever had and I love him. But he’s famous for pushing. He’s not the reason for my condition. But the need to prove something to him kept driving my standards up and my self-worth down,” Orchard says. “I was so sick of the grind, being judged, always under a microscope. It’s hard to see that when people always want to get more out of you. It really wears you down.”

Throw in the cultural factors and it makes the scenario more complex. Sportsmen are not naturally emotional, more so in Australian culture, where they prefer putting up a tough exterior. “The culture among Australian men is bravado, brave, strong, tough, forget about your issues. If you have a problem, you don’t go to a doctor. It’s an Australian cultural thing to say, ‘he’s all right…he’ll be okay.’ Perhaps it’s not just Australian sportsmen but sportspersons everywhere,” Orchard says.

Orchard is happy to accept he is ‘different’. He is brave but he does not hesitate in talking about his issues, which is when most of his friends realised that being a professional sportsman isn’t as rosy as it looks.

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Anxiety about diseases

His friends thought he had made it big. That he had a dream life, travelling around the world, playing in front of big crowds and getting paid reasonably well. For the longest time, even Orchard believed he did. After all, he has been a key figure in Australia’s all-conquering hockey team, notching up more than 150 appearances. “People think, ‘Oh! Wow, it must be awesome. Yeah, it is awesome. But it also has some side-effects,” Orchard says.

Side-effects that only he knew about. A few of his teammates had an idea, but no one really knew the extent or the seriousness of the problem. Orchard’s anxiety issues began the day he left his family near Sydney for Perth, where the Australian Institute of Sport is based. Paranoia started creeping in for what were diagnosed as minor or even non-issues – minor chest pain, a lump around neck, bleeding gums.

After just one year away from home and in a competitive environment, he admits he was ‘a bloody mess.’ Once, traces of blood when he took a bite of a sandwich freaked him out. His gums were bleeding. The next morning, the same thing happened when he was brushing his teeth. He entered the key words ‘bleeding gums’ on Google. “Bang, leukemia popped up. So I started searching for symptoms of that. Easy bleeding – yeah. Fever – I was a bit sweaty. Fatigue – now that you mention it. Swollen Lymph Nodes – probably. I didn’t even actually know what they were originally, but once I found them, I reckon I pressed them until they became sore and swollen. So for the next few weeks I seriously thought I had leukemia. It wasn’t until I asked for a blood test that things returned to normal,” he says.

At a gym session last year, he asked his teammate Matthew Swann to check his armpit for he feared they were swollen. Swann laughed. But the anxiousness did not end there. At the slightest thought of being unwell, he would think it could be something serious, like cancer.

He laughs about how many times he has diagnosed himself. “I remember being at training one day. While picking up balls between drills, I stopped and thought to myself ‘f**k, how can I play hockey with cancer? I’ve spent entire weeks planning my life for diseases that could kill me, soon finding out of our team doctors that all I have is a sore throat or a cold. Or anxiety,” he says. “And I have a lot of guilt about these self-diagnoses as well. I often think how selfish I am to make this stuff up when there are thousands of people out there who actually have these diseases.”

The constant fear of acquiring a life-threatening disease started to have an impact on his game. During a training session a couple of years ago, he almost came to blows with Australian legend Jamie Dwyer over a small disagreement. At training two months ago a coach said they were to do a drill, which Orchard didn’t like. Without any provocation, he screamed ‘f**k!’ That was that. This incident and the latter one at the team hotel in Antwerp were catalysts for him to take a break and focus on his mental well-being.

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Message from Ireland

Before going public, Orchard thought it was only fair that he informed his teammates first. “I walked in there feeling pretty good, happy with my decision. But I got in there and just couldn’t talk. I remember looking at them and getting all emotional,” Orchard says. The team was shocked, coach Graham Reid explained the situation. “Some had a feeling of what was happening. But I don’t think anyone knew the magnitude of how deeply it affected me. Seeing me visibly cry reinforced into them how important it was to me and how big a deal it was for me to talk to them,” Orchard says, adding that the blog was an attempt to reach out to players who were going through something similar.
It did open the door for other players. Moments after he posted his blog, he got a message on Twitter from Ireland international Paul Gleghorne. The Irishman’s problems were much more serious than his Australian counterparts. But he did not have the courage to pen his thoughts.

But inspired by Orchard, Gleghorne too wrote a blog recently where he opened up about his suicidal instincts. Though it wasn’t directly related to the pressures of sport, it did have a role to play. He, however wrote how he used to send emails to himself, which ultimately acted as his saviour. “My thoughts of self-harm got progressively worse since childhood. One day, I had had enough and I decided I was finally going to end the pain. I went to visit the cemetery where my mother (who passed away when I was 16) was buried. As I looked at my mother’s grave, it brought back memories of how hard she battled against cancer, how she just refused to give up,” Gleghorne wrote.

He added: “With tears in my eyes, I decided that I wasn’t going to give up either. I went home and sent myself an email to remind me to make an appointment with my doctor the next morning. I view that moment as the defining moment in my life (so far). At 26 years old, I finally went for help for something I had struggled with since I was a child.”

Orchard says, a couple of his Australian teammates too confessed to facing similar problems. “Several guys have said they are not ready to come out in open yet. But they face such issues. It was comforting to know it wasn’t just me, someone else is feeling the same way,” he adds.

England coach Bob Crutchley, too, acknowledges he faces such issues from time to time, especially when he has to break the news to a player who has been dropped from the squad. “These are proud young individuals who want to be the best. There are a lot of insecurities, especially over their spot in the team,” Crutchley says. “There are so many occasions where a player has broken down; where he just can’t take the pressure. But we have formed a support group where we look out for each other.”

Australia travel with a full-time sports psychologist and have created a structure within the team where players are encouraged to share the burden with others. “We have this new regime where we have been bashing our heads against the wall to try and be honest with each other. Trust that if I tell you something, you’re going to try and help. If you spread the load among other people, it becomes easier on you,” Orchard says.

It’s something, he insists, is much needed in the Indian set-up. In his interactions with Indian players, some of whom have become good friends, Orchard has realised that the Indian culture does not encourage players to speak openly about their psychological issues. It’s something he hopes will change. “I think the Indian hockey system is cut-throat. We get on really well with a bunch of Indian guys at HIL but we don’t have deep meaningful bonds with them. I’ve played with SV Sunil, he is a good friend but I don’t know about his life or how he feels about pressures of playing for India. There must be enormous pressure on them. Some guys are sensitive but I don’t know if they fear for what you (media and public) guys will say about them or how they feel about it? But it’s an important issue,” Orchard says.

For now, though, Orchard is happy just to be back on the turf without getting paranoid over small issues. And he hopes his move could pave the way to address the complex relationship between mental illness and sport.