Coco Gauff and her depression

Coco Gauff, 16 years old young new international tennis star. wrote on the website Behind The Raquet to have been depressed for a year, although getting good sports results has never been a problem and lives in a family where she is well and that accepts her. Nevertheless, something in this life with early successes has been a stimulus to develop depression from which she claims to have recently emerged.

“Sometimes I felt too busy compared to others. Most of my friends go to normal high school. I felt like they were always so happy to be ‘normal’. For a while I thought I wanted to be, but then I realized that, just like social media, not everyone is as happy as what you see in their posts. It took me about a year to get over this idea”.

In this blog, we have often talked about how sport can be a highly stressful situation for young people who dedicate a large part of their lives to succeed in tennis as well as in any other sport discipline. The high level of success achieved in adolescence, the total investment in a single sporting activity and the obvious reduction in social life to which the athlete is subjected, as well as the increasing pressures brought about by ever higher sporting expectations and the external environment can lead to psychological problems. These often appear with the spread of a feeling of estrangement from the present and depression as a lack of the idealized normal life that peers seem to lead.

If then the sport successes are experienced as an end on which to play the self-confidence and not as a means to realize oneself certainly as an athlete but above all as a person, the psychopathological disorders can find a fertile ground on which to develop.If you discover that you only play to win games, to become rich, to have the privileges that top athletes have, sport life becomes an endless chase to always have something more to be happy.

You can play tennis also for these reasons, absolutely legitimate, but if you don’t put yourself at the center of your sports project with the awareness of your skills and deficiencies, the risk of not holding up to the pressures inherent in sports-agonistic activity will be very high.

Here are the statements by Coco Gauff.

“I’ve always wondered how better or worse my life would be without tennis. With what this sport has given me I cannot imagine my life would be better without. At times I found myself too busy comparing myself to others. Most of my friends go to normal high school. I felt like they always seemed so happy being ‘normal’. For a while I thought I wanted that but then I realized that just like social media everyone isn’t as happy as what you see in their posts. It took me about a year to get over that idea. Again, my results were still okay, so this didn’t have much to do with tennis. I just wasn’t happy playing anyway. My parents did a great job of trying to make sure I did ‘normal’ childhood things. I was able to go to homecoming this past year and was planning on going to prom until the coronavirus. I do try to see friends as much as I can. My parents both work so I do spend a lot of time at home alone. It is challenging to do school alone while you can’t socialize with other students. Even though I may miss some things, I think this lifestyle I live is perfect for me, and it’s not for everyone. Traveling is never easy. I have two younger brothers and we are all really close. Every time I leave them it hurts a bit. I miss one of my brothers’ birthday every year because it falls right in the middle of the French Open. Through this all I am so lucky to have them because they aren’t the ones to be jealous. They don’t mind me getting more attention, they understand and are always supportive of what I do.

Throughout my life, I was always the youngest to do things, which added hype that I didn’t want. It added this pressure that I needed to do well fast. Once I let that all go, that when I started to have the results I wanted. Right before Wimbledon, going back to around 2017/18, I was struggling to figure out if this was really what I wanted. I always had the results so that wasn’t the issue, I just found myself not enjoying what I loved. I realized I needed to start playing for myself and not other people. For about a year I was really depressed. That was the toughest year for me so far. Even though I had, it felt like there

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