Opinion
Mental health in the AFL has been a massive talking point in recent years, and the league has done some amazing work around the issue, with more and more conversation being sparked.
AFL.com.au published a series called Last Time I Cried, which sits star players such as Tom Boyd and Campbell Brown down for a raw and vulnerable chat about mental health.
Furthermore, the Manage Your Mind program was set up by the AFL Players Association to help with this issue.
The recent controversy with Geelong Cats recruit Jack Steven was heavily scrutinised with seemingly every AFL news outlet reporting on the incident.
(Photo by Dylan Burns/AFL Photos via Getty Images)
More and more interest in the topic built and with every article, every reader, every comment on a Facebook post, it got worse for Jack Steven. This is an issue that is going to be carried with him for the remainder of his career.
The same thing happened recently with former North Melbourne coach Dean Laidley, who was arrested and photographed by a police officer, who has since been stood down.
Laidley was clearly experiencing some severe mental health issues, but again, due to us as a society and the media’s interest for gossip, this issue will follow him for the rest of his life.
The way we as an AFL community treat mental health is disgraceful. There are large portions of the community who openly mock players with severe mental health issues, and we continue to speculate on those players’ lives and the incidents that follow them. This makes it a far bigger issue for the players as from then on they would not be remembered as a footballer but rather a footballer with problems.
Certain sites start articles by saying things along the lines of ‘Jack Steven has been experiencing severe mental health problems’ and then follow it up by talking about an incident that surely would have been humiliating for him to thousands of readers.
It’s understandable that we have to talk about players’ injuries. Steven is a classy player, so if he’s injured it will be big news. But for us to then go on to make it the top news story in the AFL and then openly mock him and Laidley online, we are never going to make mental health an easier issue in the AFL.
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