Sean Meagher/The Oregonian

By Andrew Greif, The Oregonian/OregonLive

EUGENE — Zach Okun arrived home enraged, and amid a "full-blown meltdown" he shared with horrified roommates what he had long held inside.

Just kill me, he screamed.

Since he arrived at the University of Oregon two years earlier, the lineman hadn’t said a word about his anxiety, depression or thoughts of suicide. Worried that revealing his turmoil would be seen as admitting a weakness, he stayed silent.

“I thought it was the tough thing to do,” Okun said. “My biggest mistake was that I didn’t ask for help. I kept internalizing things, until it came out.”

It spilled out at his house east of campus on a January 2017 night “that kind of saved me.”

There was an intervention.

An invitation.

And later, a realization.

Okun and numerous other athletes locally and around the world are now sharing that realization publicly in hopes that others also struggling to confront their mental health will listen: You’re not alone.

On a midwinter day on the UO campus, only months after medically retiring from the Ducks and just weeks after the suicide of Washington State quarterback Tyler Hilinski rocked college football, Okun sat on a park bench and told his story.

"If I didn’t talk about it now, when else would I?" he said. "Wait for the next kid? There’s not another time."

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BIG PROMISE, BIG PRESSURE

In preschool, Okun was as tall as his teacher. He weighed 180 pounds in fourth grade and more than 300 in eighth grade, the same year UCLA offered him his first scholarship.

“Football was always fun,” he said. “Especially when you’re bigger than everybody else by 100-something pounds.”

The youngest of three siblings, he was born big and was told from the start his future would be, too.

“It was like destiny,” said his mother, Christine. “From when he was a tiny kid, I’m talking like 2 years old, people would say, ‘Oh you’re going to be a football player.’

“That’s a lot of pressure and you don’t realize it until … I don’t think we really realized the downside.”

Perhaps because there was so much upside. At Newbury Park High School, 45 miles northwest of Los Angeles, Okun had a “golden” four years, his mother said. He became a U.S. Army All-American, and one of the nation’s top offensive linemen. The same person one newspaper called a “monster masher” was also called a deep thinker, sensitive and inclusive. The 6-foot-4, 310-pound star wasn’t shy about holding the hand of his mother, who worked on campus.

“Super jolly,” Okun called himself.

It all masked nagging feelings of anxiety and depression. After he arrived at Oregon in January 2015, adjusting to the pressures of college athletics and life exacerbated those feelings. He felt inadequate, anxious, and his obsessive-compulsive ritual of counting in fours, manageable since his early teenage years, teetered on crippling. If a coach criticized his technique during practice, he’d obsess over it for days.

"When you internalize things like I did," he said, "everything is the biggest deal in the world."

In August 2016, during a preseason practice before Okun’s redshirt freshman season, his father, Steve, received a call from UO that his son was en route to a hospital in an ambulance after suffering a massive concussion that left him on the turf "out for like a minute." It wasn’t his first concussion -- he stopped counting them when he stopped reporting them -- but it was easily his most severe.

He returned to practice within two weeks, but between mood swings and anxiety over missing practice time, he felt more volatile than ever.

The closest he came to suicide, he said, were a few “half-assed” attempts he classifies as “experiments.”

More often, he’d imagine it.

"Driving to practice I’d be like, 'I’d rather drive into this pole,'" Okun said. "It starts as a joke at first — and then it’s like, I wasn’t really kidding. That’s scary. Then it became, I didn’t care what I did because I knew I could end it at any minute. That was how I coped with things."

In their zeal to eliminate imperfections, football players and coaches aren’t unique in the highly charged world of high-level athletics. But football’s obsession with strength permeates the culture of a locker room where no one wants to be the weak link.

"You don’t talk about mental health, especially in the game of football, where it’s mental toughness and it’s being a big, macho guy," he said.

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Bruce Ely/The Oregonian, 2014

Okun was a four-star offensive lineman and prep All-American in high school and committed to the Ducks in 2014. He was all smiles during his official visit that season before Oregon played Stanford in Autzen Stadium.

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But he was far from an exception.

Thirty percent of female student-athletes and 18 percent of males showed "clinically relevant depressive symptoms" in a 2016 study of Division I athletes by researchers at Drexel and Kean universities. And an NCAA study two years earlier found that 48 percent of women athletes and 31 percent of male athletes had reported anxious feelings within the past year.

Those figures were actually lower than their non-athlete peers. Yet the athletes were also less likely to report their issues, the report’s authors wrote in a 2014 NCAA mental health manual.

"Student-athletes are inundated with factors that may affect their mental health and wellness," wrote Brian Hainline, the NCAA's chief medical officer, noting the pressure to perform on the field while maintaining academics off it. "And the 'culture' of athletics may inhibit student-athletes from seeking help."

In Corvallis, Oregon State gymnast Taylor Ricci and soccer player Nathan Braaten understood that all too well. Their campaign to address mental health among college athletes, Dam Worth It, began in January with videos in which Ricci and Braaten detailed their experiences losing teammates to suicides.

Bad test grade? Sprained ankle? Ricci and Braaten found their peers unquestionably knew how to remedy those.

But dealing with depression, anxiety or suicidal thoughts? At best, athletes sought resources but didn’t know where to find them. At worst, the topic carried such a stigma that those suffering, like Okun, felt isolated from even asking.

“It’s something on our campus that was not talked about for a very, very long time,” Braaten said.

After Hilinski’s death, suddenly people were more willing to talk about their mental health. In the months that followed, NBA stars DeMar DeRozan and Kevin Love spoke about their histories of depression and panic attacks. Former Ducks football player Derrick Malone detailed his battle with depression. In Corvallis, athletes were asking questions and Dam Worth It had answers.

"People are saying, 'Hey I watched the video and I stepped into a counseling office,'" Ricci said. "'Because of you, I realized I’m not alone." … Those are just that gratification and that reassurance of what we’re doing is working."

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Get support

If you are having thoughts of suicide, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255.

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Eric Evans/University of Oregon

Okun on the opening day of his first UO fall camp, in 2015.

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CHANGED ATTITUDES

When Kim Harmon started as a team physician for Washington’s football program 20 years ago, a collegiate athletic department with a sports psychologist on staff would have been an exception. Now, when medical officials from across the Pac-12 meet annually, mental health is one of the top points of discussion as schools scramble to provide more resources.

"There’s a bigger willingness to talk about mental health issues," she said. "There’s also been a bigger uptick in the need for mental health resources."

Mental health diagnoses are rising campuswide at Oregon and that increase mirrors a national trend, said Greg Skaggs, Oregon’s director of athletic medicine. Washington’s athletic department works with two sports psychologists and athletes are screened for depression and anxiety, in addition to physical injuries, during annual preseason exams. Oregon’s athletic department contracts two certified counselors contracted to work with the athletic department. And the morning after Okun’s meltdown, he awoke to a message from one of them.

As Okun had raged, a roommate did what Okun had refused to do for years and asked for help. And help arrived in an invitation to meet from David Mikula.

At their first meeting Mikula, a psychotherapist and director of Eugene’s Center for Family Development, taught Okun to breathe deeply.

Okun was skeptical. Can't I just get a pill?

No pill. Instead, "he taught me a foundation," Okun said.

In their weekly meetings, Mikula taught Okun coping tools that he continues to use to process, vocalize and de-escalate stressful situations. He could recognize warning signs and what fueled them, as well as how to stop them.

At the same time, Okun became more open about sharing his feelings with those closest to him — his parents, siblings, girlfriend and his teammates and roommates Drayton Carlberg, Jake Breeland, Brady Aiello and Shane Lemieux. He got a dog, a Chihuahua and dachsund mix named Dennis. He leaned on staffers on the athletic department’s medical team, such as Skaggs and associate director Kevin Steil.

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Dean Hare

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"The reason I feel like I’m still here is I had such a strong support system," he said. "I had something at the end of my day that I could look forward to. I had people around me to brighten that day up. I know the struggle of doing it alone, too.

"It sucks."

The athletic department’s Behavioral Health Management Team had established best practices and policies related to mental health. Athletes were constantly educated about their options. Trainers, doctors and team officials understood how to identify red flags. Okun had even seen Mikula around and knew his role. Yet without an intervention from Okun’s roommate, the process still almost didn’t work.

To Okun, that speaks to how deeply rooted the stigma has become.

It’s also why Harmon, as chairwoman of the Pac-12 Student-Athlete Health and Well-Being Committee, saw immediate value in the student-led Dam Worth It and helped award Ricci and Braaten a $60,000 grant in May to expand to all 12 conference campuses — the first student-led initiative funded by the committee.

"I can tell people about mental health and 'don’t be embarrassed' until I’m blue in the face," Harmon said. "But that does not have nearly the impact as someone’s peer saying, 'Hey, it’s OK, I’ve experienced this too,' and really destigmatizing it and almost normalizing it."

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Eric Evans/University of Oregon

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FOOTBALL'S IMPACT

At times in his meetings with Mikula, Okun recalls being asked whether football was helping his problems or making them worse. His response never wavered.

"I love football, I love football, I love football," he said.

With treatment going well, Okun continued preparing for the 2017 season under new coach Willie Taggart. But progress was tenuous.

The night before the first preseason practice last July, Okun had a panic attack. Another hit the following morning as Okun, inside the Hatfield-Dowlin Complex, shook until he felt he could barely breathe. Ten minutes before a meeting of offensive linemen, he called as many trusted people as he could to ask what to do.

"Pretty terrifying," Christine Okun said of the call. "It was one of those times where I think I knew that this was a big deal. This was huge."

That day, Skaggs delivered advice that remains vivid for Okun: If you were my son, I wouldn't let you do this. Fundamentally, Skaggs said, his job is to ensure athletes are as healthy as possible. With Okun, it had become clear football and its pressures were hurting, not helping.

"To get to the point where these kids are, they’ve put so much time and energy into it and it’s so much of their identity is being an athlete," Skaggs said. "It’s so difficult a decision for them to finally decide that they can’t do this anymore, or shouldn’t do this."

Why play, Okun thought, if it just meant risking an addiction to Xanax?

"Zach was smart enough," Steve Okun said, "to realize there’s life after football."

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In June, Sports Illustrated reported that Hilinski had suffered from an early stage of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a disease linked to repeated head trauma that includes concussions. Hilinski's parents have said they were told their son, who was 21 when he died, had the brain of a 65-year-old.

Since learning of Hilinski’s CTE diagnosis Okun, who also is 21, has reassessed the amount of blame he places on football. He still loves it. But he acknowledges it isn’t without serious risks. The Okun family all point to the 2016 concussion as a "defining moment" that changed him. Zach says there is a "clear distinction" in his personality before and after.

"It’s crazy to realize your brain is changing on you," Okun said. "That’s a very real thing for people my age and that’s terrifying."

How directly concussions lead to depression remains a "gray area," Harmon said, but "typically we do know that underlying conditions are often unmasked with the concussion.

"We know when people get a concussion that people with underlying mood disorders, migraine headaches or other conditions, even ADD, it can make it worse for a while."

Okun’s feelings toward football also remain in a gray area. The game molded him. But he knows it also damaged him.

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Sean Meagher/The Oregonian

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LIFE ON TRACK

When Okun graduated from Oregon in June, his support system was by his side once again: His girlfriend, family, even Dennis.

"Life got on track," he said.

In elementary school he wanted to become a scientist. Now the goal is practicing environmental law. Okun is on a wait list to UO’s law school and will learn soon whether he’ll start courses in August.

Eighteen months after their first meeting, Okun and Mikula still talk. But his progress has allowed their chats, once weekly, to grow more sporadic.

Not every day is perfect. But the change is notable. Okun is "the Zach I know" again, his mother said.

"Asking for help hasn’t made me a different person," he said, "but it’s given me the resources to live a life of happiness and fulfillment."

Okun still doesn’t know which roommate called for help that January night last year, but he is ever grateful. He once believed that revealing his mental health crises would mean exposing a weakness.

Now he knows doing so was the toughest, but most important, thing he ever did.

He wants others to know: It was damn worth it.

— Andrew Greif

agreif@oregonian.com

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