“I DIDN'T KNOW HOW TO STOP HURTING, SO I TRIED TO KILL MYSELF”

Alan Dymock investigates the mental health pressures associated with professional golf and the unique challenges players can face

- Alan Dymock

It’s the quicksand,” says former Canadian Tour golfer Andrew Jensen, calmly guiding us through the journey to his personal low and the realisation that he has an illness.

“I mean, two or three years into my career, I’m C$20,000 in debt, and it’s like ‘okay, how do you get out of this?’ You’ve got to play well. Oh, next year, I’m in C$40,000 of debt. ‘How do you get out of this?’ You’ve got to play well.

“And then when I was sick by 2011, I was like C$45,000 in debt. I had no job. I had my parents’ basement. I had nothing to offer anybody. So all of these triggers just hurt so much and for me, I didn’t know how to stop hurting so I tried to kill myself a couple of times, because that was the only way my brain computed. Just stop hurting.

“No one wants to die. We just don’t want to hurt, right. That’s the human make-up.”

It’s a matter-of-fact way of rendering a sickening decision, but there is also a history leading into this. He goes on: “I tried to kill myself in the year 2000 [as a teenager]. I stood on roadways after missing cuts and tournaments, thinking ‘just let a car hit me.’ All these things have happened and then 2011 is when it was like, ‘Okay, you’ve got to go to the doctor man.’”

Jensen tried to throw himself off a roof that year and ended up hospitalised. Just a few weeks earlier in 2011, he had been on what he now believes was the wrong medication for him, medication he also tried to overdose on. He vividly remembers moments from that year: the arresting realisation of suicidal thoughts while he was in the shower; screaming at himself in the mirror with a stomach full of gin and pills; the aftermath of the aborted jump.