First there was Marcus Trescothick, sleepless in a hotel in India, shuddering out of an England tour, an England career. Then Mike Yardy, a world Twenty20 winner suddenly laid low. Several past and present England internationals – an entire slip cordon – followed suit. The reasons they cite are various: stress, homesickness, even "going cuckoo". But the catch-all term that physicians prefer is more familiar: depression.

Now Jonathan Trott, for four years the embodiment of the self-absorbed sporting hardman, has followed suit, leaving Australia on Mondayafter one test of the Ashes series. "Trotty has been suffering from a stress-related condition for quite a while," said his coach, Andy Flower. "I don't feel it is right that I'm playing knowing that I'm not 100% and I cannot currently operate at the level I have done in the past," said Trott himself. We cannot know yet the exact nature of his indisposition; his sudden departure suggests a serious setback.

It also raises a broader question. Does cricket have a problem? Is there something about the game, the combination of luck, bloody-mindedness, unpredictability and caprice that can drive a person over the edge? Or is it the other way around: that the kind of people who make it to the top of this game are the kind of intense, driven individuals whose very self-obsession makes them more vulnerable to mental illness?

A survey earlier this year conducted by the benevolent fund of the Professional Cricketers Association (PCA) asked 500 cricketers present and past a range of questions about mental and physical health. It found 5% of those surveyed had sought help for mental health problems. The global figure is roughly equivalent: depression is a condition that affects about 5% of the world's population, according to the World Health Organisation. That's 350 million people.

Trescothick is not sure cricket is anything special – though he has certainly noticed that since he came clean, other players will come asking him for advice. "I've spoken to people along the way," he said in a recent interview. "Some people asking a few questions, someone might call on behalf of someone else to find out about it. Some people want to talk, say 'I've struggled with this or that.' I just tend to listen. I can't advise on a clinical level. Some of it is similar to my own story.. It's a problem of stress. Everyone has their own pressure and anxiety that they live their life by. Just because I play cricket doesn't mean to say I'm more vulnerable. It's no different from any other walk of life."

Graeme Fowler is not so sure. "I went from making a double hundred for England to being in the Lancashire seconds four months later," says Fowler. "There were massive ups and downs."

All sports have their ups and downs of course, and cricket is not alone in producing sports stars with depression. Ian Thorpe , Robert Enke, Frank Bruno, John Kirwan, Ronnie O'Sullivan, Neil Lennon. But like me, Fowler finds himself wondering "whether cricket attracts a certain type of person, or cricket makes you a certain type of person". It's often said that cricket is a game played in the head. But how much of the fitness regimes, the net practice, the tactical and strategic preparations are concerned with what a player is thinking about?

"We do loads of physical training, but how much of it concerns the brain?" asks Fowler. "Very little." And this from a man who is not just a fellow depression sufferer but a coach of young talent. "Even though we know it's all about temperament, how you deal with pressure, we do very little about it."There are plenty of theories – and scientific disagreements - as to the cause of depression, many of them too medical to mention here. After four years of thinking about the subject, I have rationalised it thus: it's a condition that feeds on stress. Once upon a time we were creatures that responded to existential threats presented by a predator with sudden bursts of adrenalin, the flight-or-fight reflex. Nowadays, the stressors have changed beyond all recognition (there are no sabre-toothed tigers any more), but the responses haven't. We have 21st century sensibilities running on neanderthal software. The adrenalin pumps regularly and often, whether we're in mortal danger or just coming out to bat at number 9 for Malden Wanderers third XI. It's an overwrought system. The psychiatrist Tim Cantopher once told me it was like putting 18 volts through a 13-amp system. It will eventually blow.

Isn't batting "trying to do the undoable"? You stand 22 yards away from a bowler, armed with a 4in-wide piece of wood and try to hit a 5oz piece of cork and leather travelling at 90 miles per hour. Again and again. No two balls are the same. Your livelihood rests on the outcome. And here's the perverse bit: to be successful, most of the time you won't want to hit the ball at all. Sometimes you might have to wait hours, days even, to bat. And then you might just get the one terrifying delivery of the match that leaves you with 0 while everyone else has filled their boots. So that next time you go out there, that notion of failure is never too far away from the back of your mind.

Or what about bowling? You must hurl a ball, with a straight arm please and from a rather exact position, 22 yards, making it land in the same place every time, with sufficient guile, pace, or other sleight of hand to avoid the destructive impulses of the batsman. You must do this again and again and again. Sometimes when you do it well, you will get little reward. And sometimes, when you do it badly, you will get lucky. Just not often enough to make a career out of it.

Jason Ratcliffe, the assistant chief executive of the PCA, admits there is something of the perverse in the game. "We all come into the game as enthusiastic excited young people," says Ratcliffe, who experienced a brief brush with depression after he retired.

"But cricket is by its nature – the wicket, the conditions, the different people you play against – so many things are out of your control. The core of the game is stoic batting, watch your off stump, leave the ball. It's the same with bowling, line and length, line and length. When you stand back and think about what you're doing day in day out, sometimes it's bloody monotonous."

Iain O'Brien agrees. The New Zealander, who played 22 tests between 2004 and 2009, has since opened up about the bouts of depression that have followed him on and off the pitch. He says cricket dressing rooms are full of players with odd mental tics. "I've played with guys with all forms of mental illness," he says, spotting OCD tendencies in some and selfishness bordering on Asperger's in others. But perhaps most illuminating of all is that he says many players will tend to dwell not on successes but on failure. It is this kind of negative, unhelpful thinking that can fuel depressive episodes.

"I had a good chat with [Australian test player] Ed Cowan," O'Brien says. "He phrased it well, said we spend more time thinking about our next inevitable failure than our next success. That's the psyche of cricketers."

He agrees with Fowler that cricket is a mental game and not enough is done to prepare players for that. "It takes strong people to get through this," says O'Brien, who has written a children's book with references to both cricket and depression, Pirates Don't Play Cricket. "It's a mental game and it costs you mental energy and it's that mental energy that I don't think we train enough. We end up in a hole and we're so headtired."

And then you retire. What's it like when you're out for the last time, back in the dressing room, finally, definitively, flush up against the beginning of the rest of your life? Not every player can go out like Muttiah Muralitharan, taking his 800th wicket with his final ball in Test cricket, or Nasser Hussain, hitting the winning runs to go to a final century at Lord's. The PCA knows there are ex-cricketers who really struggle with life beyond the boundary. Ratcliffe says one in three players will struggle with the post-career transition; the PCA's survey found that of those recently retired, a significant minority – 24% – said they were less than satisfied or disappointed with their post playing career. "I really hadn't found anything to replace cricket as a love as a passion as a job," says the former Essex bowler Darren Cousins in one of several videos the PCA has prepared to help players negotiate the psychological perils and pitfalls of a professional career.

"I'd really hit rock bottom, even so that I'm not proud of it I tried to take my own life in March 2011."

Sadly, cricketing suicides are not rare, as David Frith's book Silence of the Heart makes plain.

Fowler told me he didn't want to kill himself, "but I didn't want to live either". He had run down the clock on his career at Durham, founded the university's centre of cricketing excellence, and was enjoying life with a young family. Bit by bit, the September "shiver" he recalled from his playing days enveloped him."It wasn't until eight years after I retired that I was diagnosed with severe clinical depression. I was at the bottom of the well, couldn't go out, couldn't talk to anyone," he recalls.

He was off work for three months, and endured several false starts in trying to get back to his coaching role at Durham university. Depression is like that – it's never just suddenly over. It fights you all the way. "I was on heavy medication. I basically ended up looking at life through plate glass window. I felt numb and that was better than feeling pain."

Eventually he weaned himself off the pills and now manages his depression with a crude points system (still interested in his scores, you see). Ten is an average, bearable day. Below 10, and he needs to watch it. Up in the teens and it's life as normal. His daughters help. "They ask 'what number are you today?' And I tell them. And they know whether to leave me alone or not."

Fowler thinks the sudden rash of mental health cases may be due to the fact that because the modern player can afford to be more open. "In my day, if you'd said you'd got depression they'd've thought you were a nutcase and no good for cricket. People kept quiet. It was like homosexuals in the 1960s who wouldn't say anything because they'd be sneered at."

Sports psychology has come a long way since then. "The acceptance has progressed. They can see people [with depression] can still function and play."

This, one must hope, will be the case with Trott, whatever the nature of his sudden difficulties. That he will work through them, supported by peers and mentors, but more importantly friends and family. People who suffer from "stress-related illnesses" often come back as stronger, wiser people. Trescothick did. I'd like to think I did too.

This is an edited version of a piece in December's edition of the cricket literary quarterly The Nightwatchman. Mark Rice-Oxley is international planning editor of the Guardian and author of Underneath the Lemon Tree, a memoir of Depression and Recovery