By now, many of us are familiar with Simone Biles’ withdrawal from most of her Olympic events due to her mental health. It feels like we have come full circle with her coming back to win bronze in beam. She said that winning that medal meant more to her than all her previous golds because of what she had to overcome to win it. I believe it.
It was interesting to watch the coverage. Immediately, the media onslaught commenced, but different from years past, there was much more lauding her for her bravery than condemnation for perceived weakness. But to me, it didn’t quite ring true. It felt scripted, like the networks and media outlets had all called meetings and laid out in no uncertain terms how commentators and reporters were to handle it. And most everyone did end up saying the “right thing”. But a change in outlook regarding a topic as sensitive and stigmatized as mental health isn’t so easy to change, especially in sports, and especially especially in American sports, where anything but a #1 spot isn’t really a reason to celebrate. I’m not saying that the public shift isn’t great. It is. It’s a huge step in the right direction. But if you are paying attention, you can still feel the unspoken judgment.
They gave it away with one little word: just. Awful, insidious adverb (at least in this context). Almost as bad as “should”.
The word “just” is a minimizer. I use it all the time, mostly when speaking to someone in greater authority to indicate that I don’t want to bother them. I actively have to edit myself and remind myself that even if the person is my boss or professor, my needs matter. Mostly I do pretty well, but it took a while to get there.
In this case, the commentator was doing her level best to be supportive, and her concern was genuine. She told viewers that worry for Biles spurred her to call around to figure out what was going on. She finally succeeded and found out that it wasn’t a physical injury. When she described that conversation, she said she asked the person, “So it’s just a mental health thing?”
What the commentator was communicating to her viewers, albeit probably unknowingly, was that a physical injury, even if it wasn’t a career ender, was much more serious than a mental health injury, that Biles would be able to get over it with a lot less effort than if it had been a broken bone or soft tissue injury.
That’s not true. Physical injuries are concrete. Even if treatment is difficult, you can determine what’s wrong and address it. With a mental health injury, it is harder to determine cause and scope, so harder to map an effective treatment, particularly if there is a time constraint like, say, a time-limited event like the Olympics. Additionally, Biles’ extraordinary physical strength and accomplishments have caused us to forget or discount that Biles was a victim of Larry Nassar, the USA Gymnastics physician who sexually abused dozens of patients, which authorities were investigating but failed to warn patients. And now we learn that a close family member died during the Olympics, as well. Drop all of that in a brain blender that already has the pressure of an elite athlete, both externally and internally, and the swamp of social media, can there be any doubt that an injury to Biles’ mental health presents as much or more of a challenge as an injury to her physical health?
Add to the complexity of it all that treatment for mental health injuries is much less concrete than for physical injuries. With both there can be multiple paths to recovery, but measurement of the success of each treatment is harder to evaluate with mental health. There may be a condition to be diagnosed, but there doesn’t have to be. There may be a chemical imbalance that can be treated with medication, but there doesn’t have to be. Either way, there is an ingrained, universal cultural stigma perpetuated over thousands of years that mental health injury indicated weakness and weakness was to be culled from society in order for the society to survive.
Any way you look at it, there can be no doubt Simone Biles is one of our strongest, so when she showed a perceived moment of weakness it caused a lot of confusion. That paradox, and Biles’ public position treating her mental health injury the same way as she would a physical injury, will have societal echoes that will benefit all of us. If our strongest can struggle with mental health and still be one of our strongest, so can everyone else who is having their own struggles come back from them and still be themselves. These are priceless gifts in the fight against stigma.
In the last couple of months, we have come a long way in how we view mental health injuries. With Osaka and Biles, and before them, Michael Phelps, carving a difficult path, our understanding, empathy, and acceptance have all improved, at least for the moment. But we still have a long way to go. There is still an air of “I wouldn’t have done that” and the confessional nature of public figures letting us know about their struggles with mental health. And the other indicators like our subconscious little word. For the record, there were other instances of subconscious non-acceptance: a segment where a guest was being supportive, but who tied Biles’ struggles back to her ego; a chyron that read, Simone Biles Bows Out of the All-Around Finals to Focus on “Mental Health”. Why was mental health in quotation marks?
But that’s all to be expected. This is cultural change, and a change of something so deeply ingrained is going to be hard and painful. But if we can reach this level of acceptance once, we can do it again. We’ll have to take it just a little bit at a time.