Mental Health Advocacy: How Athletes Like Kevin Love Are Breaking the Stigma

I have lived with periodic depression since my thirties. The first time it came, it was so severe I didn't want to eat. I say that at the top because I want you to know I'm not writing about mental health from a comfortable distance.

The stigma surrounding mental health has been one of the biggest barriers to people getting the help they need. It has kept conversations private, kept treatment delayed, and kept people who were suffering convinced they were the only ones suffering. For decades, awareness campaigns chipped away at it slowly. Then a handful of high-profile athletes started talking about their own experiences in a way nothing in a public-service spot could match. 

Kevin Love. Simone Biles. Naomi Osaka. Michael Phelps. They didn't inspire in the generic sense. They normalized the specific reality of mental health conditions in front of audiences who couldn't look away.

Key Takeaways

• Mental health stigma is still one of the biggest barriers to treatment-seeking, and it has proven harder to shift than most advocates anticipated.
• High-profile athletes disclosing their own struggles have produced documented improvements in public attitudes and measurable increases in help-seeking.
• Kevin Love's 2018 Players' Tribune essay about his on-court panic attack is widely credited as a turning point inside professional sports.
• Simone Biles' decision to withdraw from competition at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics redefined what mental strength means, in real time, on the biggest stage in sport.
• The Ruderman Family Foundation has been working on mental health for more than a decade through research, higher education partnerships, the Morton E. Ruderman Award in Inclusion, and direct advocacy with athletes and entertainers driving cultural change.
• Awareness, by itself, is no longer enough. The next phase of this work is leadership.

Why Mental Health Stigma Is So Persistent

Stigma has been more resistant to change than anyone working on it expected. Part of it is invisibility: unlike most physical conditions, mental health conditions can't be seen, which invites skepticism about their reality. 

Part of it is the cultural narrative of willpower, which frames suffering as a failure of character and produces the shame that feeds the silence. Part of it is the institutional history of how people with mental illness were treated in the twentieth century. 

And part of it is that stigma operates at every level at once, individual attitudes, employer practices, housing, and healthcare, so no single intervention solves it.

Kevin Love and the Moment That Changed the Conversation

In November 2017, Kevin Love had a panic attack in the middle of an NBA game. He was a five-time All-Star at the height of his career, and what he experienced on the court was, in his own description, debilitating. Months later, he wrote about it in The Players' Tribune. He described the panic attack in detail. He described the anxiety he had been managing privately since his early teens. He described starting therapy.

That essay was a turning point. Inside professional sports, mental health had effectively been a forbidden topic, sealed off by a culture of stoicism that read any disclosure as weakness. Love broke that seal. The response demonstrated how many people had been waiting for someone to. Other athletes followed. Fans wrote in saying his disclosure had pushed them to seek help for the first time.

I interviewed Kevin on the All About Change podcast. What stood out was his honesty about what he didn't anticipate. He told me, "There was never another moment in my life when I was approached by more people who shared their own struggles that they, too, had been afraid to talk about and address. It was life-changing for me." He went on to found the Kevin Love Fund, which works to reduce stigma and provides young people with the tools and support they need. 

He endowed a chair at UCLA's psychology department to fund research into anxiety and depression treatment. His operating principle is one I share: if you can't measure something, you can't change it.

In 2021, our foundation honored Kevin with the Morton E. Ruderman Award in Inclusion, named after my father, who founded the Ruderman Family Foundation. We chose him for his role in destigmatizing mental health and bringing the conversation into the open. The line he gave when he accepted has stayed with me: "Athletes around the world have shown us incredible courage by shining a light on the mental health toll that comes with extreme pressure. They helped kick-start a cultural shift around mental wellness."

Simone Biles and the Redefinition of Mental Strength

In July 2021, at the Tokyo Olympics, Simone Biles withdrew from the team gymnastics final after a single vault. She withdrew from the individual all-around the over the folllowing days, then from vault and uneven bars finals. She cited her mental health, and she described a condition called the twisties, an anxiety-related phenomenon where a gymnast loses her sense of where her body is in space mid-air. In a sport where every skill is performed at high speed in air, the twisties are not a metaphor. They are dangerous.

What made Biles' moment different from previous disclosures is that she made it in real time, at the biggest competition in her sport, with the world watching and the expectation in the room that she would simply push through. She didn't. She protected herself.

The response divided sharply along exactly the lines mental health advocates have been working to address. Critics called the withdrawal weakness or selfishness. Supporters recognized it as something else: a demonstration of self-knowledge and self-respect that the culture had not previously been able to read as strength. Biles, in deciding her limits in public, redefined what mental strength looks like in elite sport. 

The lesson she taught wasn't that mental health is fragile. It's that knowing your own state and acting on it is itself a form of strength. She came back at the 2024 Paris Olympics and won 3 golds, but the comeback isn't really the point. What she made visible in Tokyo is.

Michael Phelps: From Silence to Sustained Advocacy

Michael Phelps is the most decorated Olympic athlete in history. He has also spoken openly about depression and suicidal ideation after the 2012 Olympics. What makes his advocacy significant is its specificity. 

He has described having suicidal thoughts during periods the public read as the most successful of his career, and the dissonance between the medals and the reality underneath them has been one of the most powerful pieces of public testimony any athlete has offered. He hasn't stopped at disclosure either; he has partnered with mental health organizations to expand access to therapy and testified before state legislatures on mental health policy. 

That combination, personal credibility plus institutional engagement, is what celebrity advocacy looks like when it changes things.

In May 2019, we presented Michael with the Morton E. Ruderman Award in Inclusion. He credits the professional therapy he received with saving his life, and he says so openly. That kind of testimony, from someone the public reads as superhuman, is what cultural shift looks like in practice.

Naomi Osaka and the Workplace Dimension

In May 2021, Naomi Osaka withdrew from the French Open after refusing to participate in mandatory post-match press conferences. She had announced ahead of the tournament that the press requirement was incompatible with her mental health. The tournament organizers fined her $15,000. The four Grand Slams issued a joint statement threatening her with future expulsion. She withdrew. In her statement, she described long bouts of depression dating back to her 2018 US Open victory.

Her decision opened a dimension of the mental health conversation that previous athlete disclosures hadn't fully reached. By framing the press conference as a workplace obligation she needed protection from, she effectively asked the question millions of workers ask every day: what accommodation does mental health actually require? 

The Americans with Disabilities Act covers mental health conditions, but many employers have flexibility for physical conditions and not for mental ones. The initial institutional response, fines and threats rather than dialogue, is exactly the gap mental health advocates are trying to close. That isn't only a tennis story. It's the story of mental health accommodation across most workplaces in most countries.

Why Athletes Are Particularly Effective Mental Health Advocates

The reason athletes have moved this conversation in ways other advocates haven't isn't accidental. The cultural narrative of athletes as physically and mentally exceptional creates a contrast effect when one of them discloses a struggle; the disclosure carries weight precisely because the audience has been conditioned to see this person as untouchable. 

Athletes also have mass platforms that a single Players' Tribune essay can reach in a day. The specificity of personal disclosure carries more weight than awareness messaging. "mental health matters" is a slogan, "I had a panic attack on the court" is a story. And athletes occupy a cross-demographic position. 

A message delivered by an NBA player reaches young men who are statistically among the least likely to seek help.

What the Foundation's Mental Health Work Actually Looks Like

The athlete examples are not separate from our institutional work. They're connected to it. The Morton E. Ruderman Award in Inclusion has gone to Phelps and Love in sports, to Marlee Matlin, Taraji P. Henson, and Selena Gomez in entertainment, to filmmakers Peter and Bobby Farrelly, and most recently to Kenneth Cole for his work ending stigma through The Mental Health Coalition. The through-line is that public voice, applied seriously, moves culture. Our job is to amplify it and convert that shift into structural change.

That work happens across several fronts. In higher education, our 2018 white paper on Ivy League mental health leave policies graded eight elite universities and found none scored higher than a D-plus. The Department of Justice was already investigating Brown University on similar issues, and the settlement that followed in 2021 required policy changes, ADA training, and $684,000 in compensation to affected students. We have since partnered with The Princeton Review on a Campus Mental Health Services Honor Roll and launched mobile therapy vans at Northeastern and Harvard.

In First Responders, our 2018 white paper, documented that more police officers and firefighters die by suicide each year than in the line of duty, and our 2022 update found those rates had not improved. We work with departments to expand peer-support programs.

In policy, the major fights continue. Parity laws require mental health coverage equivalent to physical health coverage, but enforcement gaps mean parity remains aspirational for many. The ADA covers mental health conditions, but employment discrimination continues. Most of the country has too few providers, and people with mental health conditions are significantly overrepresented in incarceration and underserved by diversion and treatment programs.

From Awareness to Leadership

Every May, organizations update their websites, and awareness campaigns flood social media for Mental Health Awareness Month. By June, most of it disappears. I wrote about this recently for Forbes: that cycle has been going on for years, and the mental health crisis has gotten worse anyway. Awareness, on its own, is not enough.

What it's time for is leadership: honoring the people whose disclosures have moved the culture, then doing the institutional work that turns culture into care. Funding research. Changing policies in schools, workplaces, and police departments. Building the infrastructure that meets the people now willing to ask for help.

Kevin Love, Simone Biles, Michael Phelps, and Naomi Osaka did what years of awareness campaigns couldn't, because what they offered wasn't a campaign. It was their own experience, told specifically, in public, at real risk to themselves.

Read more about my story and what drives the work, or pick up Find Your Fight for the rest.

FAQs

How has athlete advocacy changed the conversation about mental health?

It has done what general awareness campaigns couldn't. Specific, vulnerable, public disclosures from trusted figures have shifted public attitudes faster than years of more conventional advocacy. Research consistently shows that visible role models reduce stigma and increase help-seeking, and the past decade of athlete disclosures is the clearest demonstration.

What did Kevin Love's disclosure about mental health achieve?

His 2018 Players' Tribune essay opened a conversation inside professional sports that had effectively been closed for decades. Other athletes followed his example. Fans reported seeking help for the first time. His foundation, the Kevin Love Fund, has continued the work by funding stigma reduction, research, and youth mental health programs. Our foundation honored him with the Morton E. Ruderman Award in Inclusion in 2021 for that body of work.

Is mental health considered a disability under the ADA?

Yes. Mental health conditions are covered under the Americans with Disabilities Act, including workplace accommodations, public accommodations, and education. The gap between the legal protections and actual employer practice remains a major issue for advocates.

What is the Morton E. Ruderman Award in Inclusion?

It's an annual award the Ruderman Family Foundation gives to someone who has made an extraordinary contribution to the inclusion of people with disabilities. Named after my father, who founded the foundation, recent recipients include Michael Phelps, Kevin Love, Marlee Matlin, Selena Gomez, Peter and Bobby Farrelly, Taraji P. Henson, Andrea Bocelli, and Kenneth Cole. Several recipients have specifically been recognized for their work ending mental health stigma.

What is the connection between mental health advocacy and disability rights?

Mental health conditions are a category of disability, and the same legal frameworks and policy debates that shape disability rights also shape mental health access. Many of the institutional fights are shared, and the two communities are stronger when they work together.

How can I support mental health advocacy in my community?

Start where you already are. Talk openly about mental health in your workplace, family, and social networks. Support local providers and organizations doing the work. Push your employer, school, or congregation to take accommodation seriously. Vote on the parity and provider-access policies that determine whether help is actually available.