Thierry Henry reveals having suffered from depression – Libération

2024-01-08 22:17:20

In a podcast published this Monday, December 8, the former star footballer of the France team and Arsenal admits to having suffered from deep psychological discomfort during his career. A confession that is still rare among high-level athletes.

Years of suffering lived in silence. Former Blues striker and current Espoirs coach, Thierry Henry, claimed to have suffered from depression during his playing career, an illness he links to his childhood, which came to the surface when he was coaching in Canada during the pandemic of coronavirus. “I lied for a very long time because society was not ready to hear what I had to say,” says the 1998 world champion, now 46, in an English interview with the podcast “ the Diary of a CEO”, published this Monday, December 8.

The top scorer in Arsenal’s history says that this discomfort accompanied him during all these years when he shone with the ball, without being aware of it. “Throughout my career, and since my birth, I must have been depressed,” Thierry Henry said. “Did I know that? No. Did I do anything to fix it? No. But I adapted to a certain way of life,” he explains.

In life, “you have to put one foot (in front) and then another, and walk. “That’s what I’ve been told since I was young,” he explains. “I never stopped walking,” except during Covid when “I couldn’t anymore. And then you start to realize.

“The tears came on their own”

Retired from the field since 2014, the former glory of Arsenal and the Blues found himself confined to Canada, away from his children who remained in Europe “for a year”, at the height of the health crisis while he was managing Montreal Impact in the North American championship. It then happened to him to “cry almost every day for no reason”, continues the current Espoirs coach.

“The tears came on their own. For what ? I don’t know, but maybe they were there for a very long time,” he recalls. And added: “Technically, it wasn’t me, it was the younger me. (Crying) for everything he didn’t have, the approval.” Thierry Henry links his mental fragility to his childhood and the constant search for approval from his father, who was often critical of his performances.

“When I was little, people always told me ‘you didn’t do that right’. So obviously, when you hear that more often than anything else, that’s what’s going to stay,” he says. After scoring all the goals in a 6-0 win as a teenager, he remembers his father telling him not to be satisfied: “You missed that control, you missed that cross.” This paternal presence “helped the athlete to a certain extent,” but, Henry concludes, it “did not help the human being that much.”