A Follow Up on Robert Enke

The German weekly news magazine, Der Spiegel, had a very intense, in-depth article after Robert Enke’s death (Spiegel #47, 2009) about the man himself and the suffering of thousands with depression.

Spiegel notes the following, albeit far more eloquently than I did:
- The role of a keeper. Baseball has pitchers, hockey has goalies, soccer has its goalkeepers. These are people that have very unique personalities and, by the position they play, are the most important parts of a team. Spiegel says that “there is no position more difficult in soccer,” and that a goalkeeper has to have “strong nerves” and “self-confidence.” A goalie goes for long stretches without any work until there is a flurry. “Enke rarely spoke about the loneliness of being a keeper.”
- Most people around Enke didn’t know the extent of his fear. Recently, it was a fear of not being able to play for the national team in next year’s World Cup (even though he was the favorite for the position). On some days, his anxiety to play in net would be so strong that he didn’t want to go to practice. At one point, he even asked his father if he would “be annoyed” with him if he quit soccer altogether (“My God, Robert, it is not the most important thing,” his father answered).
- Spiegel asks if soccer doesn’t “destroy its own protagonists.” Does the sport “swallow all its talent up and then spit it out as mental wrecks and committers of suicide?” Or is it from a society that “turns performance into a fetish which makes its celebrities sick and depressed?”
- Depression effects everyone, although people with lower incomes are more prone
- Although the WHO has noticed that the number of depression cases has increased, it doesn’t mean that more people are getting sick, it means that more people are being diagnosed
- In Germany, it’s estimated that depression is the cause of 90% of suicides
- General practitioners still don’t know enough about the illness to diagnose and treat it correctly
- One out of every seven people that suffer from severe depression end up taking their lives
- In Europe, suicide is more deadly than AIDS, drug use and traffic accidents… combined
- People with severe depression often have trouble with remembering and sometimes it is so bad that it is similar to dementia. The reason is that cortisone blocks the hippocampus in the brain, which is the part that records new information
- When something good happens, dopamine and serotonin flow through the brain. Depressed people have trouble enjoying anything or feeling good because these chemicals simply don’t flow
- Heavy depression requires medication because the brain makeup changes
- Men are less likely to seek treatment because they don’t want to be seen as weak