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Clarke Carlisle: I have tried to kill myself five times but finally I can say ‘I am well’

Former Burnley and QPR defender opens up on his battle with depression and multiple suicide attempts

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Ten years ago, just before Christmas, Clarke Carlisle was walking the streets of York looking for a good place to die. He had played his last game the year before then moved successfully into TV work, travelling to the Brazil World Cup as an ITV co-commentator. It had been a solid career, 16 seasons spent mostly in the top two divisions for Burnley, Blackpool, QPR and Leeds, among others.
There was a spell as chairman of the Professional Footballers’ Association, four episodes as a contestant on Countdown in 2010 (winning three), and being named Britain’s Brainiest Footballer in a TV quiz hosted by Carol Vorderman. Behind all of this was Carlisle’s counter-narrative of social anxiety, shame and destructive behaviour.
He remembers little of the 2014 World Cup, which passed him by in the fug of depression. Afterwards he was let go by ITV and the loss of income and a drink-driving charge triggered a spiral of gambling and despair.
“I had the distorted logic that if I do it on the 22nd of December, then everyone can enjoy Christmas and New Year because the funeral will have to be in between,” he says over lunch in York, not far from the dual carriageway where he attempted to take his own life. It was there he stepped over a barrier and into the path of a lorry travelling at 60mph. Carlisle expected the end, instead he woke up in the road with horrifying injuries.
Suicide devastates everyone who encounters it, but to those observing from a distance it can be a falsely neat narrative conclusion. “We are very forgiving and accepting of people in death, especially when it’s by suicide,” says Carlisle. “You read these glowing obituaries but we don’t afford those people the same consideration and compassion when they were living and acting out due to their mental health issues.”
Carlisle recovered physically, becoming well enough to run the London Marathon in 2016, but life was still turbulent. His marriage ended, he paid damages to the driver of the lorry and has five children to support. This is a messy path with little public precedent, and Carlisle is walking it in some surprising ways.
A drinker to excess at his worst, the assumption is he must be an alcoholic. At one point Carlisle thought he was, but this afternoon he buys us each a pint of sensible-strength lager with lunch. It does not seem taboo, because of how he speaks about his progress. “Alcohol has its rightful place in my life. I love a refreshing light pint of beer. That isn’t the enemy, nor is it the solution. Gambling is a different one. I choose not to gamble because it is still innate within me to try to win back any money I lose.
“Finances are tight for us, so there’s a practical implication to me losing money. I want to provide for my family and I would much rather earn the money to pay for my house than win it. It’s not satisfying.”
It has been a hectic year. He has a new job as the chief operating officer of It’s Mental, which provides well-being coaching. He passed a psychology degree with first-class honours and is now studying for an MBA at the University of York.
Around this, to pay the bills, Carlisle is delivering parcels on nine-12-hour shifts for Amazon. Sometimes he is recognised, a couple of weeks ago the former Stoke and Cardiff midfielder Graham Kavanagh opened the door to him. There have been challenges, setbacks, and knocks, but he had a realisation a few months ago. For the first time he could say something with certainty: “I am well.”
“I was in the Amazon van the other day and on the other side of the road there’d been some kind of accident. There was a person in the road and someone was performing CPR. There was a guy walking away with his head in his hands. It punched me in the gut. I just burst into tears. About two hours later when I was on my delivery route I had to stop my van for half an hour and have a good cry.
“I’ve made so much progress psychologically, talking about what happened. That was the first time it had been physically represented to me, a similar moment and the impact to those around it. I just felt so sorry. Not guilty, just so sorry for my actions and my life course, having had that impact on other people. It was a heavy moment.”
Afterwards Carlisle completed his route, spoke to his wife Carrie and told his bosses. Such openness represents progress. “When I say I’m well people often misinterpret that as me saying I’m happy or things are easy. No, it means life can do things, things can be challenging, I can have heavy emotional experiences like that and I process them in a constructive way. That’s wellness.”
Despite his candour and clear intelligence, there is an unease in knowing that Carlisle spent his career covering up his struggles well enough to play nearly 500 games, 30 in the Premier League. Some team-mates and managers confronted him about his drinking, but few sensed the scale of his troubles. A year after his suicide attempt on the road he spoke convincingly and movingly about having the tools to handle depression. Then he tried to take his life again.
It is a hard-won peace when you have attempted suicide five times. The first was during a long injury while with QPR, the second during his time at Leeds, about which he remembers almost nothing. Two came after the 2014 attempt in front of the lorry in 2017, once at home, another after going missing in Liverpool. It was after that when something shifted, including the relationship with his father. They spoke when Carlisle was in a psychiatric hospital.
“He put his hand on me and said ‘son, whether you’re a footballer or a bin man, whatever, I just love you. I’m so proud of you.’ And that broke something in me, because I had lived my life as though I had to earn his attention and affection.”
Discipline and manners were big for his father, who sensed his mixed-race kids would have to work harder than others to get on. So Carlisle grew up frightened and as a child, when there was turbulence in his home, he would hide behind the settee. He still acts this out sometimes, standing in a secluded corner next to his fridge when he needs to think about something challenging.
“A lot of our responses are informed by childhood experiences. The analogy I put on it was, does eight-year-old Clarke need this or does 45-year-old Clarke need this? And that was another good distinction for me, is it the child within me that’s reacting?
“I was desperate for everyone to like me, it was all about external validation. Me making friendships or having relationships, it was very rarely based on what I wanted. It was usually based on needing to make them love me.”
It is one thing to understand your instincts and where they might come from, but quite another to sustain long-term change. Given the perceptive way Carlisle speaks about emotion and his degree in psychology, you might think he has a religious-like relationship with therapy. Again here, he is not doing what you would expect.
“There are people who tell me ‘I’ve been in therapy 10 years now, every week,’ and it’s like, why? Where do you get your opportunity to step away, apply all those learnings and evolve as a human? You get your awareness raised in therapy and you get things identified, but then you’ve got to live it. So go and live it.”
Clearly many footballers struggle when their playing careers finish and Carlisle says that the traits you need to succeed on the pitch are often incompatible with a happy life away from it. “That optimal performance state, win at all costs, an almost obsessive-compulsive nature, tunnel vision, myopic to the goal, it’s necessary.
“Yet when you apply that in your personal life, especially the perfectionism and the incredibly high levels of accountability and demand on others, you bring those into your relationships and all you see are imperfect people and broken relationships. The standard that you’re looking at life through is warped.”
He would like to see a support system in place for players at all levels, which does not depend on the varying resources of individual clubs. Information about a player’s welfare and specifics about their mental well-being “should be centralised, and that information should be available to the welfare staff positioned at every club. That information doesn’t go to the coaching, managerial or club staff”.
His own abilities as a player were, “my strength, aggression, heading the ball”. That is not how I remember him. I considered him an urbane ball-playing centre-back in his early days at QPR and liked him so much I had his name printed on the back of my teenage replica shirt. I bring it with me to York and show it to Carlisle. “That’s giving me goosebumps. I’ve gone hot. Emotion, pride, amazement.”
Recall for games and even team-mates was never great, but he is becoming more concerned about the long-term effects of heading. “I’m losing words, losing train of thought, memories are getting looser. I love words and when I’m losing just everyday banal words it registers for me.
“I mentioned it to the PFA team and they were like ‘it’s a bit difficult for you, Clarke,’ and I said ‘why, just because the last thing I headed was a truck?’ Yeah, I’m a bit anomalous.”
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