Kevin Love opens up about panic attacks in essay

CLEVELAND– Kevin Love opened up about his battle with panic attacks on The Player’s Tribune.

In the essay titled “Everyone is going through something,” Love says that he suffered his first panic attack on Nov. 5, right after halftime in the Cavs’ game against the Atlanta Hawks. Love left the game and the team took him to the Cleveland Clinic. In the essay, he writes that there is a stigma surrounding athletes talking about their feelings and mental health.

“So for 29 years, I thought about mental health as someone else’s problem,” Love wrote. “Sure, I knew on some level that some people benefited from asking for help or opening up. I just never thought it was for me. To me, it was form of weakness that could derail my success in sports or make me seem weird or different.

“Then came the panic attack.”

According to Joe Vardon of cleveland.com, Love told teammates he exited the game against the Oklahoma City Thunder in January because of a panic attack as well. The disclosure came during that team meeting on Jan. 22 when both Isaiah Thomas and Dwyane Wade questioned why Love left the game and missed practice the following day.

The five-time league All-Star hasn’t played since Jan. 30 because of a fractured bone in his left hand. He’s averaging 17.9 points and 9.4 rebounds this season.

Love wrote in the essay that the Cavs connected him with a therapist after the panic attack on Nov. 5, who he has been seeing since.

“I want to make it clear that I don’t have things figured out about all of this,” he wrote. “I’m just starting to do the hard work of getting to know myself. For 29 years, I avoided that. Now, I’m trying to be truthful with myself. I’m trying to be good to the people in my life. I’m trying to face the uncomfortable stuff in life while also enjoying, and being grateful for, the good stuff. I’m trying to embrace it all, the good, bad and ugly.”

After the first panic attack, Love said he was “relieved” that no one found out or wrote about why he left the game. Then he began to question why he cared so much if people knew.

“Call it a stigma or call it fear or insecurity — you can call it a number of things — but what I was worried about wasn’t just my own inner struggles but how difficult it was to talk about them,” he said in the essay. “I didn’t want people to perceive me as somehow less reliable as a teammate, and it all went back to the playbook I’d learned growing up.”

LeBron James took to Twitter to share support for Love after the essay was published.

You’re even more powerful now than ever before @kevinlove!!! Salute and respect brother! ✊????? https://t.co/6nL6WoZMCm

— LeBron James (@KingJames) March 6, 2018

Love also said that he was inspired to come forward because of Toronto Raptors guard DeMar DeRozan’s disclosure that he has dealt with depression. He said DeRozan’s comments probably helped someone, and hoped that he could do the same.

“Mental health isn’t just an athlete thing. What you do for a living doesn’t have to define who you are,” he wrote. “This is an everyone thing. No matter what our circumstances, we’re all carrying around things that hurt — and they can hurt us if we keep them buried inside. Not talking about our inner lives robs us of really getting to know ourselves and robs us of the chance to reach out to others in need. So if you’re reading this and you’re having a hard time, no matter how big or small it seems to you, I want to remind you that you’re not weird or different for sharing what you’re going through.

“Just the opposite. It could be the most important thing you do. It was for me.”

Read Love’s entire essay on The Players’ Tribune.