Depression

Continuing our swing through the misery that is training camp, the big news out of Lehigh (that's where the Eagles do their business) is that guard Shawn Andrews, one of the best interior linemen in football and a two-time Pro Bowl selection, has been battling depression, which is why he's been out of camp.

Andrews was a first round pick for the Eagles in the 2004 draft as an early entry from Arkansas. As with so many of these guys, he came out early for money for his mom. In his career, he's had two significant injuries, the first being a broken leg that cost him time during the Super Bowl year, and the second being a neck injury that took him out of the Saints playoff game. The latter was a big factor in the loss, in that the only thing keeping the Eagles from scoring at will in that game was the Saints' getting to Jeff Garcia.

In short, he's incredibly valuable to the team, and without him, you don't have Bryan Westbrook doing what he does, or Donovan McNabb remaining upright. He's also never been known to draw stupid penalties, pop off to the media, or pule for more money. None of which, I'm afraid, will spare him from what's to come.

Here's the money quotes from the Philly Daily News and Inquirer, as relayed through the AP (which is enough attribution to get me sued, one suspects).

"I'm willing to admit that I've been going through a very bad time with depression. I've finally decided to get professional help. It's not something that blossomed up overnight. I'm on medication, trying to get better... I really was kind of at my end... In the state that I'm in, I would be at training camp physically, but mentally, I could have gotten myself hurt or gotten one of my teammates hurt."

Andrews is in his fifth year, and he's eating a $15K a day fine to be out, which is enough to make anyone depressed (rim shot), because the absence is not excused.

Now, given his track record, value, and my general disinclination to take much of what happens in training camp as a sign of the coming apocalypse, I'm more or less willing to ignore the whole thing. The world will (probably) little note, nor long remember, the mostly private battles that a big man had with a serious psychological medical condition faced in the off-season.

But what's more interesting is what this will say about the fan base and media.

Some will take the high road (read: softballs to keep player and team access). From these folks, you'll get half-hearted defenses of the seriousness of depression as a medical state, statistics on how many people in the country are under a doctor's care for it, and maybe some numbers on how much we spend on Prozac and the like. These people will be more or less ignored.

Then, you'll get the meathead yammering and cheap frat boy pot shots that make up most sports discourse, especially from fans of rival teams. Hell, if this had been someone from an NFC East rival with a track record of obnoxiousness (read, Plaxico Burress, Terrell Owens, Chris Cooley, etc., etc.), I'd have been right there with them.

But Andrews isn't one of those guys. What he appears to be, instead, is someone who is trying to get through it, who has made the choice to be open about the situation. For that, I'm pretty sure he's going to get slaughtered, but maybe that's actually going to help... because one of the best ways to deal with depression is, frankly, to delude yourself into distraction with an outside source. (Like, oh, say, a sports blog.)

Today's off-kilter tangent is brought to you by the 18th century. Sailors used to be judged for their unclean and awful ways, and when they got scurvy, that was judged to be a character flaw. Scurvy, of course, is caused by a deficiency of Vitamin C in the diet. Whether you're a nice person or not has nothing to do with it. So what does it cost us all, really, to proceed as if depression is similar, and we just haven't found the Vitamin C yet?

So, to Eagles Fan, especially if he's likely to go bust off a call to some braying jackass fest... Andrews is an elite athlete, with obvious physical gifts, and enough competitive fire to have risen to the top levels of his profession. Leave him the hell alone, and find something else to concern yourselves with.