Plight of former Sheffield Wednesday man Chris Kirkland isn’t too rare – should football do more to kill ultra-macho image?

That isn’t some weird brag, rather a way of describing just how closely the bloke held what he described as a secret.

We’d been talking about injuries and how football clubs – then and now – handle them. We spoke of footballers as commodities and the lack of help out there when things don’t go so well. We spoke of the lack of help out there when things are going well, but when mental strains take their toll anyway.

The conversation hadn’t been designed to go in that direction, but there we were. It was for something I was working on and as those conversations do, they covered a range of topics and ended with thanks, a goodbye and a ‘catch you soon’.

Usually you hear nothing more from your interviewee until you next badger them for a quote or follow-up chat further down the line, but a couple of days later I received a text. It asked me not to include ‘that’ portion of our conversation.

No confidences have been broken here – this piece goes out with the permission of said player with all the content checked – but in a later conversation we touched back on what he had said and why he hadn’t felt comfortable putting his name to such themes publicly.

Now the content of this chat was honest and brave, but by his own admission it wasn’t especially harrowing. The issues touched on stress and tough times, but nothing like the sort of spiralling mental health issues described by so many other players.

Even so, the player preferred to keep the public content of the interview well away from mental health.

It wasn’t worth it, he said. People would look at him differently.

Of course that wish was respected. That’s absolutely his prerogative and no person should ever be pressured into sharing any thoughts with the world, be them about football, the weather or matters a little more personal.

But memories of that chat were triggered this week by the opening-up of former Owls goalkeeper Chris Kirkland, who at the age of 41 spoke to friends in the national media about a battle with addiction to painkillers that almost caused him to die by suicide.

Kirkland’s account is disturbing and serves as a cautionary tale of a problem lived in secret. His battles with mental health are well-known, but his latest bravery opens up a new side to a struggle so many people suffer from. His comments that he knows of several people within football who suffer from a similar addiction sadly come as no surprise.

A column written nearly two years ago told a story similar to our anonymous friend, by a former manager who spoke of a player who during his time in charge of Wednesday battled mental health issues and suffered what he described as a breakdown – all entirely in secret.

The player in question, to my knowledge, has not spoken publicly about his issues publicly – again, nor should he feel he should have to – but more worrying a theme was his apparent unease at discussing it with anyone within the game, or in seeking professional help.

Now in hundreds of chats with footballers about hundreds of things these themes rarely come up, but it does paint a worrying picture of not only mental health within football but the unease of discussion.

The two anonymous players were from entirely different eras and things may have changed more recently.

But for all the strides made in so many areas in recent generations, from the outside periphery looking in, football remains a pretty macho industry.

Though I’m sure they don’t mean it in that way, Chris Kirkland’s former teammates seem to say the same thing about his struggles – that you would never have known of his plight from the way he was in training or indeed on matchdays. It’s almost described as a compliment; that he managed to ‘get on with it’.

Kirkland himself says only a small handful of people at the club knew of his anxiety and while he says he wish he’d have been more open to telling his teammates the truth about where he was at, he never quite felt able to.

After a couple of years of struggle with depression and anxiety post-university, I myself had a mental health breakdown in 2016 and was found crying and curled up in the corner of a toilet cubicle just days into a new job. I have scrapes with it still from time to time.

It’s not something I talk about much – some close friends and family reading this will have found that out for the first time – and I was and am lucky enough to have a support network around me I felt and feel able to confide in.

While the stigma is lifting, for whatever reason it feels like the world itself still isn’t the most open place to discuss such things; be that publicly or on a more personal level.

Recently departed former Wednesday man Sam Hutchinson is one of a handful of current pros to have spoken openly about his scrapes with mental health and was proud that that discussion was able to embolden others to do the same.

For all we know the discussion of such issues are commonplace and that care is taken at football clubs to ensure its talented young assets are well looked after, that confidential help is readily on-hand should any player feel they need it.

For all we know the periphery image of an ultra-macho industry is short-sighted and players are made to feel comfortable enough to seek help long before they hit the depths of Chris Kirkland.

Lets hope so.