Olympian Alexi Pappas on Bringing Mental Health Issues to Light in Sport

The title came from a poem I wrote on social media. There are a lot of words that young women, myself included, desire to be, that are very outward facing, like “pretty,” “fast,” “fierce,” and “strong.” I think creating a word like “bravey” is more inward facing, and it’s more of a choice that we make about our relationship with ourselves. I know when I was younger, I probably would have benefited from having things I could’ve just decided to be, instead of just chasing and hoping that I was these things that I couldn’t actually control.

How has your diagnosis, as well as your mom’s suicide, affected your training, your career path, and how you view yourself?

For a long time, I felt like I was running to chase an external accomplishment because I wanted to matter, because I didn’t feel like I mattered enough for my mom to “stay.” I think I’m now equipped to handle my mind as a body part, and have the vocabulary and tools to manage depression—should symptoms creep up again—much earlier.

As people, and especially as athletes, we’re familiar with the term “prehab,” which refers to the things you do for your body to prevent injury when something feels off. Now that I have some tools that are the equivalent for my mind, I’m able to recognize it a little bit quicker, and see that it means that I should pause and either ask for help or just figure out what’s going on.

Those were things that I ignored when I went through my own depression, because I didn’t recognize that those were things I might need help with, not things that were just going to resolve themselves if I pressed forward. Now I pause much sooner than I did before.

How was treating a mental health diagnosis different for you than any physical injury you’ve dealt with in your career?

The major difference was how challenging it was to get help. I was living and training in Mammoth Lakes, California, and had to relocate back to Eugene, Oregon, to even have in-person mental health care, which I really needed. In the way of psychiatric care, I only found telemedicine.

And even back in Eugene, I had to basically ask for favors to get into those appointments. Even being an Olympian with seemingly endless other resources, it felt impossible. I can only imagine how challenging getting this help can be for the rest of the population.

In the book you wrote, “My mom felt ashamed of her struggles and tried to keep everything hidden. She didn’t want people to know how she felt, but now everyone’s going to know, and I’m going to tell them because everyone can learn from this.” What were some of the biggest misconceptions about depression and suicide that you’ve learned now?

One big misconception is that it’s a choice to be depressed or to feel the way that you might feel. And from the perspective of someone who is sick, another one is that you know the future, often feeling like, “I will always feel this way.” That’s how I felt, and that was a misconception on my part because we can’t know the future.

You’ve said that your doctor described your depression as an “injury” to your brain—why did that flip the switch for you?

It made me feel like I could heal. I wish I had known to treat my brain just like I would treat my body as an athlete because all of those parallels spoke so simply and clearly to me, like “take care of it before it’s injured.” Or the minute you feel some small symptom to address it, because there’s no shame in asking for help.