With Her Candor, Osaka Adds to Conversation About Mental Health

Making herself vulnerable, she joins other noteworthy athletes in pushing the once-taboo subject into the open.

Naomi Osaka’s withdrawal this week from the French Open stunned tennis. But her decision was also a potent example of a movement among elite athletes to challenge the age-old notion that they are, and must be, as peerless in mind as they are in body, untroubled by the scourge of mental illness. Ms. Osaka, the highest-paid female athlete in the world, who said she had faced “long bouts of depression” since she won the United States Open in 2018, was only the latest addition to the fast-expanding roster of renowned players across sports who have spoken out about mental health. Taken together, the disclosures by these athletes, who have sometimes been empowered by social media and word of one another’s experiences, have pushed the subject from the recesses of the sports world squarely toward the center of modern life’s biggest stages. And they are forcing the sports community to acknowledge that the pressures of competition have assuredly contributed to illnesses among some stars — and that those stars were never untouchable. “There’s more acceptance of the fact — and more understanding of the fact — that mental health is a real thing, and in the athletics realm, it takes serious bravery for these high-profile athletes to come out and use the word ‘depression’ or use the word ‘anxiety,’” said Jamey Houle, the lead sports psychologist at Ohio State. He was also an all-American gymnast there.