Robert Enke suffered in silence but his suicide may bring the game to its senses

To date, Justin Fashanu remains the only male professional footballer anywhere in the world to disclose that he was gay.  There can be no smaller minority.  The issue of gay footballers remains one of the great taboo subjects in the game, with clubs and managers who queue up to recite PR guff about racism or hooliganism suddenly washing there hair whenever a media outlet goes out on a limb and tries to raise the issue of homophobia in football.

But players who are ‘in the closet’ are not the only group that football marginalizes to the point of denial.  This week’s suicide of Germany international goalkeeper Robert Enke, who jumped in front of a train on Tuesday, casts a grim light on how hopelessly football, and indeed sport in general, deals with the issue of young men’s mental and emotional health.

There can be no debating issue in the world about which more utter bullshit is spoken than depression.  Any radio phone-in which covers the topic of work-related stress, depression or mental illness will inevitably be littered with ignorant cretins telling the sufferers, at best, to ‘pull their socks up’ and, at worst, to stop faking it and get back to the rat race.

A casual scan through the BBC 606 tribute board reveals that ignorance still abounds.  Though most posts are intelligent, sombre and respectful there are still those with the view that what Enke did was weak and selfish.  “Life is tough.”  “Everyone has problem but you have to face them with your chin up.”

Clinical depression is a disease so serious that it can reduce a man who is set to play for his country, a major global power, at a World Cup; a man with a devoted wife and adored adopted child; a man almost universally popular with his fans, both for club and country; a man so well paid as to be financially secure forever to believe life is not worth living.

Is football to blame for Robert Enke’s suicide?  Not entirely.  We will never know the nature of the demons which torture those for whom life becomes unbearable.  Even the most evocative suicide note will not adequately communicate the horrors of depression at its worst.

Football did not drive Robert Enke to his death.  It cannot be blamed for that.  But the game, and indeed society more generally, is guilty of creating a boorish macho atmosphere that so stigmatizes depression that you can understand why men like Enke keep their illness a secret to the point of obsession.  Can you blame Enke for worrying that the German authorities would have taken his young adopted daughter away had they learned of his mental problems?

Football’s history of treatment of depressed players is as horrendously shameful as its attitude to homosexuality.  When Guardian writer Tim Adams asked Ron Atkinson whether he sympathised with Stan Collymore’s mental state, the former Aston Villa manager replied: “Not on fucking 25 grand a week.”

Herein lies the problem.  Many people still think depression just means ‘being sad’, in the way that you might be sad at grandma’s funeral, or after losing a job or when England lose to Germany/Argentina/Portugal on penalties.  That it the equivalent of saying that to be an alcoholic is to have poor timekeeping.

To be depressed is to find yourself unable to make the simplest of decisions; choices which are often absurdly inconsequential.  To have shelves full of books with bookmarks still wedged in at page 28 because that is as far as your attention span will ever take you.  To be reduced to a state of panic or apoplexy by merely not being able to locate your car keys or the Radio Times.  To suffer, despite a busy working life, hobbies aplenty and an active social life, from a semi-permanent sense of utter, leaden boredom.  To find yourself losing interest or pleasure in normally enjoyable activities.  At its worst, to display symptoms of psychosis.

We may be sure that the case of Robert Enke is not remotely uncommon among sportsmen.  The media continues to treat those like Paul Gascoigne as novelty acts, as exhibits in a freak show.  Only this week, Spain is preoccupied with the issue of nervous anxiety.

In 2006 there were two promising young wingers based in Seville.  Jesús Navas at Sevilla, Joaquín at Real Betis.  Joaquín, following the 2006 World Cup, joined Valencia and we have barely heard from him since, overshadowed as he is by the more consistent David Villa, Juan Mata, David Silva and, of late, Pablo Hernández.  He has fallen from grace within the international set-up.

Navas has never had that luxury; he has never played for Spain.  He finds time spent away from his family so disorientating and nerve-wracking that he has been disregarded as an international prospect.  Alas, it is not hard to imagine Spanish football fans in tapas bars across the country sharing sentiments to the effect that Navas is a mummy’s boy and needs to pull his finger out.

Hallelujah: faint progress is in sight.  Spain coach Vicente del Bosque seems prepared to try to address the problem.  Navas has been called into Spain’s squad for Saturday’s friendly against Argentina in Madrid.  So good is Navas that Spain feel they cannot afford not to approach his troubles with those most rare commodities in football: compassion, patience and maturity.  How many other managers would have written Navas off, despite his enormous ability?

Football does not make people depressed but it can prolong the problem by failing to encourage sufferers to speak out.  A read of Marcus Trescothick’s award-winning book Coming Back To Me shows that other sports too suffer from the macho culture that led to Trescothick’s appalling treatment from elements within the sporting media.  Were there to be another England cricketer with a mental illness, who could blame him for feeling the aggressive alpha-male banter in the changing room would kill off any hope of dealing with his illness openly?

It is not just players who are the problem.  Only this week The Monday Miscellany wrote of how many of football’s problems come down to the fans.  Too many people are ready to dismiss footballers who talk about personal problems as jessies.  Sol Campbell has been bullied mercilessly by morons – not just Tottenham Hotspur fans – since his illness at Arsenal.  Too many fans would regard mental illness as a burden their team can ill-afford to bear.  Impatience, ignorance and prejudice gnash their teeth at a troubled player.

Let us not confuse mental illness with personality problems.  Marlon King is a thug; Paul Gascoigne, though he has done many things of which he ought not be proud, has never been.  George Best, football’s previous ingenious alcoholic, was a hedonist who lived his life recklessly but Gascoigne is very different.  A deeply sad figure who gets virtually no enjoyment out of life except for kicking a ball.  Best wasn’t a tragic figure; Gascoigne is.

We can only hope, once again, that this shock death has brought sport to its senses.  Football only needs its protagonists and disciples to do one thing: be nicer.  To get its priorities right and put the well-being of an opponent before the opportunity to exploit their weakness.  Similarly, a player’s first objective when attempting a slide tackle should not be to win the ball but to challenge safely.

The trouble is the nature of competition itself, particularly at a professional level.  The win/lose dichotomy is brutally important.  Results become an obsession.  The notion that other things may be more important is lost in the polemic world of professional athletes.  Judgements are made not on whether somebody is well but whether they are useful.  Nobody is ill, they are just unreliable.  Anxiety is seen as weakness; depression as ingratitude.

If football’s latest tragedy is not to be in vain, we must accept that sporting achievement does not induce emotional peace.  Depression is the Ulysses of illnesses: it envelopes all of life.  A clean sheet would have provided little respite for Robert Enke.  Briefly, at least, German football knows its proper place in the great scheme of things.  Sport is coming to terms not just with the sad loss of a participant but with its own ultimate triviality.  For del Bosque, the performance of Navas on Saturday is secondary to his development as a person.  The stakes, temporarily at least, have been lowered.  That is progress.  Chin up.