CLEVELAND -- Hours after Kevin Love penned an essay for the Players' Tribune, in which he detailed his battle with mental health, LeBron James, took to Twitter to praise his Cleveland Cavaliers teammate.
On Tuesday, Love revealed in an essay titled "Everyone Is Going Through Something" that he endured a panic attack after halftime of the Cavs' loss to the Atlanta Hawks on Nov. 5. The event caused the 5-time All-Star to take a hard look at his mental health and ultimately led to regular appointments with a therapist.
Wrote Love:
Call it a stigma or call it fear or insecurity — you can call it a number of things — but what I was worried about wasn’t just my own inner struggles but how difficult it was to talk about them. I didn’t want people to perceive me as somehow less reliable as a teammate, and it all went back to the playbook I’d learned growing up.
This was new territory for me, and it was pretty confusing. But I was certain about one thing: I couldn’t bury what had happened and try to move forward. As much as part of me wanted to, I couldn’t allow myself to dismiss the panic attack and everything underneath it. I didn’t want to have to deal with everything sometime in the future, when it might be worse. I knew that much.
Love insisted that the therapy visits have since helped him and went on to praise Toronto Raptors star DeMar DeRozan, who revealed last week that he has been battling depression.
Currently sidelined with a broken hand, the 29-year-old Love has averaged 17.9 points and 9.4 rebounds this season while appearing in 48 games. According to the Cavs, he is a little less than a month away from returning to action.
