Love opens up about mental health, recent in-game panic attack

During the 10th game of the 2017-18 regular season against the Atlanta Hawks, all of the weight Cleveland Cavaliers All-Star Kevin Love had been carrying at the time came crashing down, resulting in a panic attack during a third-quarter timeout.

"When I got to the bench, I felt my heart racing faster than usual. Then I was having trouble catching my breath. It’s hard to describe, but everything was spinning, like my brain was trying to climb out of my head," wrote Love in a recent piece for The Players' Tribune.

"The air felt thick and heavy. My mouth was like chalk. I remember our assistant coach yelling something about a defensive set. I nodded, but I didn’t hear much of what he said. By that point, I was freaking out. When I got up to walk out of the huddle, I knew I couldn’t reenter the game - like, literally couldn’t do it physically."

Love mentioned he had been dealing with undisclosed family issues, and that the Cavaliers' slow start to the campaign was also troubling him.

The organization helped him find a therapist, which Love was at first skeptical of seeing, as he had programmed himself to handle his issues on his own, and he didn't want to be perceived as weak.

"But (the therapist) surprised me. For one thing, basketball wasn’t the main focus. He had a sense that the NBA wasn’t the main reason I was there that day, which turned out to be refreshing," Love said. "Instead, we talked about a range of non-basketball things, and I realized how many issues come from places that you may not realize until you really look into them. I think it’s easy to assume we know ourselves, but once you peel back the layers it’s amazing how much there is to still discover."

The two still meet up a couple of times each month, with Love acknowledging that one of his biggest breakthroughs came when he started opening up about his grandmother, Carol, who passed away after being in a coma. He said he was "devastated for a long time" and never really had a chance to grieve, but that being able to talk to someone about it in a safe environment was truly "eye-opening."

Love also credited DeMar DeRozan's recent comments about struggling with depression for helping him muster the courage to write his own piece. He agrees with DeRozan's sentiment that "you never know what that person is going through," because Love had no inkling that the Toronto Raptors guard was battling with mental health problems of his own.

"I want to end with something I’m trying to remind myself about these days: Everyone is going through something that we can’t see," Love added. "I want to write that again: Everyone is going through something that we can’t see.

"The thing is, because we can’t see it, we don’t know who’s going through what and we don’t know when and we don’t always know why. Mental health is an invisible thing, but it touches all of us at some point or another. It’s part of life."