THE EMOTIONAL CONNECTION TO AN INJURY

A month after breaking her left leg and blowing out her right knee in a skiing crash in Switzerland, Picabo Street, the fearless, spunky media darling of the 1998 Nagano Olympics, shut herself in the bedroom of her parents' house and closed the blinds. She would not let family or friends in, she took no phone calls, did not watch television, did nothing for weeks but lie there in the darkened room thinking miserable thoughts.

"I went through a huge depression," Street said. "I went all the way to rock bottom. I never thought that I ever would experience anything like that in my life." What sent her hurtling into a depression was the realization of how long and difficult her recovery would be. In the end, it took 20 months.

It is hard to pin down how common depression is among injured athletes; research in this field of sport psychology is limited. But one study of 343 male college athletes from a variety of sports found that 51 percent had some symptoms of depression after being injured, and 12 percent became moderately to severely depressed.

"I'd say one out of every four or five of the injured athletes who come to our center suffer from depression," said Dr. Gerald Kaforey of the Vanderbilt Sport Medicine Center at the Vanderbilt Medical School.

Those who get depressed may stay that way for several weeks after being injured, their mood lifting only as their injuries begin to heal. Some athletes, especially those with longer recovery periods, may stay depressed for months. And in rare instances, injured athletes have attempted or committed suicide.

Emotional reactions to injury can often be harder to deal with than the actual injury.

Dr. Deborah Saint-Phard, who treats patients at the Women's Sports Medicine Center of the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City said, "There's a pervasive sense that athletes are superhuman, not only in their abilities to perform athletically, but also in their morals, their ability to handle pain, disappointment and injury." Saint-Phard, a former Olympic shot-putter, is a physiatrist, a doctor who specializes in rehabilitation.

Athletes themselves take on these larger-than-life expectations and may not reveal to others how much they are suffering. Nicole Detling, who tore a ligament in her knee while playing basketball in college a few years ago, could not endure people feeling sorry for her, so she withdrew into her dorm room.

"I was an athlete," Detling said. "I not only had all this physical strength, but I had mental strength. And being injured felt like a huge kind of weakness."

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(Thanks SFGate.com)