Michael Phelps is so routinely open about his depression and anxiety that it’s hard to remember a before time. But it wasn’t until 2015, when Sports Illustrated writer Tim Layden sat down with the most decorated Olympian of all time, that Phelps started speaking freely about his mental health. He divulged his time in rehab the previous year for alcohol use: “I wound up uncovering a lot of things about myself that I probably knew, but I didn’t want to approach. One of them was that for a long time, I saw myself as the athlete that I was, but not as a human being.” After his second DUI, he said, he hadn’t wanted to be alive anymore.
Simon Bruty/Sports Illustrated
These kinds of disclosures happen more frequently now, to the point where they almost seem commonplace; Naomi Osaka’s and Simone Biles’s names are just two of the many that have become shorthand for these monumental stories. Those are exactly the stories Phelps wants to hear. In honor of Monday’s World Mental Health Day, he’s announcing an NFT collection coming soon, with his proceeds going to his Michael Phelps Foundation. In advance of the seven-year anniversary of his groundbreaking cover story (his ninth for SI), Phelps is yet again reflecting—on that cover, on himself and his mental health, and on advocating for industry-wide change.
