Robert Whittaker on living with depression

If you break an arm, it hurts terribly, an x-ray reveals the extent of the injury, and it gets fixed. If you have a comparable diminishment to your mental health, the hurt can be confusing and can diminish your ability to discern, diagnosis is complex, and treatment is more complex still.

Perhaps worst of all, many sufferers from depression are reluctant even to begin to address the issue. In his latest Grange TV podcast, UFC middleweight champion Robert Whittaker spoke only about battling depression.

Part 1 (20:43)

Part 2 (27:24)

I’ve never talked about this sort of stuff, but I get depressed in losing and seeing how far I’ve fallen, said Whittaker, as transcribed by Elias Cepeda for Yahoo Sports. I start to go on a downward spiral into what you’d call depression. Because, when that starts to happen, it’s hard. I feel the problem with depression is that you don’t see it creeping up on you. You don’t all of the sudden go, ‘well, I feel terrible, I must be going through depression.’ What starts to happen is it’s subtle, and it’s sneaky. And it creeps in. It starts slow. You don’t want to go out, or you don’t feel like training.

Your mate will call you, and instead of answering, you’ll be like, ‘naw, can’t be bothered.’ Or, you’ll get text messages … and you feel like you just can’t be bothered replying to text messages. That’s how it starts.”

Then, you start trying to get out of [training] sessions. One, because you feel like there’s no drive taking you there to do it. And two, the feeling of going to the session and getting absolutely hammered…you go to the session, you don’t perform well, and then you sit back and look at yourself and think, ‘well, I’m not performing well because I took all these months off or because I haven’t been doing the right things’ and then you’re double depressed. I start to really retreat into myself and just feel bad. I feel terrible. I feel unmotivated to do things and it just gets worse and worse and worse.

When I was younger, I was quick to temper, because anger is the most easily accessible emotion to withdraw. To cover things, mask things.

Whittaker went on to talk about a hard time he had, mentally, after fighting Yoel Romero.

You don’t realize how withdrawn you’ve become, and how far into that whirlpool of depression you’ve sunk until there’s no one around you anymore, and your relationships are already on the cusp of falling apart. And, that’s the most terrifying part about it because you don’t realize it’s happening to you until you’re there.

It really does help talking about it.

Whittaker says he now speaks with a therapist.

And despite all, he fights interim champion Israel Adesanya in the main event of UFC 243 at Marvel Stadium in Melbourne, Australia on Saturday.