BMX and Mental Health
by Richard Mungall
July 23, 2017
July 23, 2017
I’ve decided to write an article about BMX and mental health. This feels natural because I’ve ridden BMX for 24 years, I’ve become a psychotherapist, I love writing, and I myself have struggled with the many transitions that come with a lifetime centered around BMX. Given the suicides of Dave Mirra and Colin Winkelman, the impetus is my intuition that something needs to be said. What? I think that just like tricks, it is important to label and name what is happening. This brings awareness, the possibility of conversation, and that’s when a culture can start to change. While we talk a lot about tricks, progression, equipment, etc., there is this whole other area of human experience that rarely gets talked about even though it is right there in the core of our lives.
I need to frame the situation. BMX is a physical activity that takes a lot of courage, energy, strength, and willpower. Toughness is often defined by counting the number of stairs next to the rail, not by our ability to be open or vulnerable. BMX is also done almost exclusively by males. The cultural construction of masculinity, especially in sports culture, is not exactly welcoming of discussions about feelings. The Man Box (link in endnotes)[i], which sees emotions as “weak”, is a hard place to be when someone is feeling depressed or anxious, let alone psychotic or suicidal. If you yourself were having suicidal thoughts, or even feeling sad, how comfortable would you be sharing that with your friends? I would say that the discussion of mental health in the BMX community is stigmatized, just as it is in the popular culture. Yet not talking about what is real has serious costs. In the US the suicide rate has increased by 25% since the year 2000. Veterans alone commit suicide at a rate of 20 people per day. In the BMX community when legends commit suicide it gets a lot of press, but there are undoubtedly many more at all levels and ages that continue to emotionally suffer in many ways, not knowing how to get the support they need.
Riding a bike is incredible. There are so many beautiful things about it that are beyond words. The few videos I did make over the years were essentially a monument to that beauty. There’s the thrill of searching for spots, the adrenaline of doing a rail, the satisfaction of pulling a tech line you just tried for literally 2 hours straight, the feeling of just cruising down the street hitting curbs and wallrides, the homies and their support and your support of them, travel, global connections, the artistic side (video, photo, art, design). It has grown from a fairly isolated thing in the 80s to a full blown, elaborated, mature (ish...) culture. It’s really a miracle it exists at all.
But yet, bike riding is also distressing and traumatic in many ways. PTSD is a real thing and it’s not just getting hit with napalm that causes it. Considering the physical side first, head injuries are fucking terrifying. How many out there thought they might die as they have convulsed or gone in and out of consciousness? Or the shock of simply witnessing this happen to a friend? Then there’s the harassment we all endure from cops, security guards, and bat-shit crazy vigilante citizens. This is very similar to the kind of emotional strain I see in the social science literature about racial profiling that is now finally breaking into the popular press. Then there’s the fights, getting jumped, hit by cars, not to mention all the little and big falls that happen on a daily basis. Masculine culture teaches us to just brush it off, “Naw, I’m good.” The only problem is that bike riders are no exception to being human. This stuff does impact us, whether we want to process it or not. And trauma doesn’t go anywhere until it is processed. People come into my office to see me for far less traumatic experiences than what the average bike rider goes through over and over.
And then there is the bigger picture. Kids who only ride for a few years in high school won’t quite understand this, but those that have been lifers will. I’ve ridden bikes basically since I started remembering things. I passed my days in school daydreaming about it, rode during every free minute, skipped dinner or snuck out late at night to keep doing it, I drove hella far to skateparks in the winter or rode street in the snow, and as an adult I kept quitting my jobs to do it. That’s love! And while I didn’t have much of a real family, it was my friends that filled that role for me and still do. When I hear about combat veterans returning home, the way they describe the special bonds they formed and their difficulty feeling that kind of closeness with “normal” people - that’s how I felt and feel about the BMX homies. Years of that kind of intense intimacy, being there for your friends’ best achievements, holding their broken ankles, making videos together, traveling the world together - life doesn’t get much more intimate than that. At this level of commitment, when people say BMX is their life, they literally mean BMX IS their life. They don’t know anything else. I know I didn’t.
For those that have dedicated their lives to bike riding, it takes up much of their time, creative energy and social lives. It is an energetic outlet that, like any aerobic activity or peak experience, balances the mind, gives us an experience of oneness with the universe, and qualifies in many ways as a religious experience. It becomes so basic to our identities that we simply say, “I’m a bike rider”, and we cannot understand our lives without it. For our inner worlds BMX is everything.
But there comes a time when the body isn’t 18 anymore. And sorry kids, but that shit comes way quicker than you’d ever imagine so enjoy that dexterity and ability to heal while it lasts! One day that softball swelling in your ankle won’t go down in just a day. Now it takes a week. And that knee will never quite feel the same anymore. And all of a sudden there’s the herniated disc and the shooting pain down the legs. And you start to realize that your dream of living out eternity in cosmic union with your BMX bike will not come to pass. Old age and death are real. It’s a harsh moment of waking up to the impermanence of life.
People define themselves in all kinds of ways. We are symbolic beings and we need to create a world with meaning, what Ernest Becker calls an “immortality project.”[ii]The problem comes when something radically shifts in our world and that identity is shattered. This can be from the loss of a loved one, the loss of a job, or the loss of the thing we love to do more than anything else in the world. This is trauma in the most profound sense.
For someone that has dedicated their lives to freestyle, the move away from BMX is more traumatic than just about anything that can happen from BMX itself. All those good things I referenced above? Those begin to flicker away like a candle burning out. This transition may result from intractable injuries, lacking the physical capacity to compete with resilient 18 year olds, the need to provide for children or a family, moving away from the culture for a variety of other reasons, or simply being “over it”. Whatever the cause, it requires us to literally reinvent ourselves in many ways. All of the needs and desires that BMX satisfied may be lost, for a short time, a long time, or even forever. The harsh reality is that nothing will ever actually replace BMX. Nothing. Just like the loss of a lover or best friend, you simply can never get it back. And it requires us to truly grieve as if we had just lost a loved one we’ve known our whole lives. Then, those that move on from BMX successfully must reinvent a whole new life for themselves: new activities, ways of being creative, physically active, new social circles, ways of making money, new dreams. This is a mythological process of death and rebirth. While some riders go to school and/or get into a profession of some kind while they are still riding, for those that don’t the transition is even harder. The most amazing, game-changing edit is worth nothing on a resume outside of professional BMX. Now we have to face the harsh reality of survival in the society that BMX helped us avoid for so many years.
Suicide is an act of despair. From my experience and studies, I have no reason to believe it is some chemical defect. People end it when they have lost their identities, feel little or no social support or intimacy, and are so overwhelmed by pain, loneliness, and isolation that having no life appears like a viable alternative to the life they have been left with. At the same time, suicide does not actually occur in isolation. Junger talks eloquently about how for veterans, PTSD isn’t just about war but the culture they return home to (link in endnotes)[iii] What he means by this is that life is traumatic, period. No one can escape this. But what we can change is how we process it, and whether we process it or not in the first place. When veterans return home to a culture that doesn’t want to talk about feelings, a culture that will send them into the battlefield but then not want to hear one word about it when they get home, that puts them into existential solitary confinement. I would argue a similar dynamic exists in BMX. I would even go so far as to say that when a suicide happens in the BMX community, we are partially responsible for that death.
To what extent do we really listen to our friends? Do we create an open atmosphere for the kind of emotional pain that comes along with the various stages of a serious BMX career? Do we stay in contact with the guy that chooses to stop, or can no longer ride? I know that I am guilty of not being there for friends that were injured, depressed, turning to drugs, or psychotic. Would things have been different if I would have really reached out to them, rather than writing them off as my culture had taught me to do? As a kid, all I knew is that they used to love riding, they lit up in the most beautiful ways, and then somehow one day they were doing heroin or some other grimy shit - and not in a fun way. Our whole culture, blinded by materialism and macho-ism, has taught us to ignore some of the most important things about our shared experiences. As it turns out, all those people in the videos doing amazing tricks have deep and important feelings!
There’s so much more that could be said but the thesis of this article is that we should break the silence. Part of that might be really asking your friends questions about how they’re doing, whether after an injury, as they transition away from BMX, or just in general even if there isn’t anything obvious going on. I personally struggled hard with anxiety and depression in high school, having a deadbeat dad that disappeared, growing up with an emotionally unavailable mom, getting jumped, harassed, etc. I didn’t dare tell my friends about my feelings, I was SO ashamed, I felt like something was wrong with me, that I needed to be “tough”, whatever the fuck that means. For me it wasn’t primarily because of debilitating injuries or any obvious traumas, my life just felt shitty and I was having a hard time. I had no idea how much all that really hurt at the time.
It wasn’t until I became an adult that I learned how to process it. For whatever reason I made it through, but not without emotional wounds. Now, after a master’s degree and looking at a lot of statistics, I see that this isn’t at all unique to BMX - by all measures our society is fucking miserable and ironically we are supposed to act like everything is ok. We might need to redefine manhood as the heroic act of being soft and honest and move away from the macho posturing that defines BMX culture today. We could definitely work on the related issues of homophobia and sexism along the way too, but I don’t have time to go into that here.
Another element is that we simply need to communicate better to kids about what they are really getting into. In a way, the elders of BMX have colluded to not talk about what it’s like to age, get injured, and eventually give it up. The skewed picture BMX media presents effectively borders on lying. At least personally I know that as a kid I had some vague idea that I’d have to tone it down by, say, age 40. No one every bothered to tell me that by my late 20s my body would already be hitting its limits, that I’d be stuck with permanent back pain and the fear that I may not even be able to easily walk down the street one day. No one ever told me that doctors are quite limited in what they can do and that injuries never fully heal. So my injuries didn’t just come with physical pain but the emotional shock and surprise of being mentally unprepared. “Holy shit – I actually can’t do this forever... Fuck.” Informed consent is all about educating people about what is at stake so that they can make more conscious choices.
Personally I would love to see more documentary stories about how bike riders are making this transition, rather than just forgetting about them because they no longer have the physical resilience to stay on the front page of the news feed. If we really loved BMX, if we really respected the greatest innovators in our culture, we’d be curious about their whole lives and not just the moment they happened to film the latest crazy maneuver. This is just one example of a way our culture could begin engaging with these ideas. I challenge the immense creativity of our culture to come up with others.
Finally, the other thing bike riders can do as individuals is get professional help. Our friends and family can be loving and supportive but that can have its limits, especially for a high-level pro that can no longer hang at the top. "Normal" people often just don't understand that kind of transition. Some opinionated advice: You can’t just find any random psychotherapist. In all honesty, just like in any field most people aren’t very good at what they do and it’s helpful to get someone that specializes in whatever you are dealing with, just like you wouldn’t go to your primary care doctor for a knee replacement. The psychotherapist you choose should be one familiar with the importance of the body and athletic peak experiences. They should know how to work with trauma, high performing people and their unique challenges. If anyone has any questions about any of this, or would like to add their thoughts and experiences to this piece, feel free to leave comments below. I am also considering starting to do Skype sessions in my psychotherapy practice. Remote work isn’t ideal but if someone has no other options it's preferable to doing nothing.
Love,
Richard
ENDNOTES:
[i]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=td1PbsV6B80
[ii]Becker, Ernest. The Denial of Death. New York: Free Press, 1973.
[iii]http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/05/ptsd-war-home-sebastian-junger
I need to frame the situation. BMX is a physical activity that takes a lot of courage, energy, strength, and willpower. Toughness is often defined by counting the number of stairs next to the rail, not by our ability to be open or vulnerable. BMX is also done almost exclusively by males. The cultural construction of masculinity, especially in sports culture, is not exactly welcoming of discussions about feelings. The Man Box (link in endnotes)[i], which sees emotions as “weak”, is a hard place to be when someone is feeling depressed or anxious, let alone psychotic or suicidal. If you yourself were having suicidal thoughts, or even feeling sad, how comfortable would you be sharing that with your friends? I would say that the discussion of mental health in the BMX community is stigmatized, just as it is in the popular culture. Yet not talking about what is real has serious costs. In the US the suicide rate has increased by 25% since the year 2000. Veterans alone commit suicide at a rate of 20 people per day. In the BMX community when legends commit suicide it gets a lot of press, but there are undoubtedly many more at all levels and ages that continue to emotionally suffer in many ways, not knowing how to get the support they need.
Riding a bike is incredible. There are so many beautiful things about it that are beyond words. The few videos I did make over the years were essentially a monument to that beauty. There’s the thrill of searching for spots, the adrenaline of doing a rail, the satisfaction of pulling a tech line you just tried for literally 2 hours straight, the feeling of just cruising down the street hitting curbs and wallrides, the homies and their support and your support of them, travel, global connections, the artistic side (video, photo, art, design). It has grown from a fairly isolated thing in the 80s to a full blown, elaborated, mature (ish...) culture. It’s really a miracle it exists at all.
But yet, bike riding is also distressing and traumatic in many ways. PTSD is a real thing and it’s not just getting hit with napalm that causes it. Considering the physical side first, head injuries are fucking terrifying. How many out there thought they might die as they have convulsed or gone in and out of consciousness? Or the shock of simply witnessing this happen to a friend? Then there’s the harassment we all endure from cops, security guards, and bat-shit crazy vigilante citizens. This is very similar to the kind of emotional strain I see in the social science literature about racial profiling that is now finally breaking into the popular press. Then there’s the fights, getting jumped, hit by cars, not to mention all the little and big falls that happen on a daily basis. Masculine culture teaches us to just brush it off, “Naw, I’m good.” The only problem is that bike riders are no exception to being human. This stuff does impact us, whether we want to process it or not. And trauma doesn’t go anywhere until it is processed. People come into my office to see me for far less traumatic experiences than what the average bike rider goes through over and over.
And then there is the bigger picture. Kids who only ride for a few years in high school won’t quite understand this, but those that have been lifers will. I’ve ridden bikes basically since I started remembering things. I passed my days in school daydreaming about it, rode during every free minute, skipped dinner or snuck out late at night to keep doing it, I drove hella far to skateparks in the winter or rode street in the snow, and as an adult I kept quitting my jobs to do it. That’s love! And while I didn’t have much of a real family, it was my friends that filled that role for me and still do. When I hear about combat veterans returning home, the way they describe the special bonds they formed and their difficulty feeling that kind of closeness with “normal” people - that’s how I felt and feel about the BMX homies. Years of that kind of intense intimacy, being there for your friends’ best achievements, holding their broken ankles, making videos together, traveling the world together - life doesn’t get much more intimate than that. At this level of commitment, when people say BMX is their life, they literally mean BMX IS their life. They don’t know anything else. I know I didn’t.
For those that have dedicated their lives to bike riding, it takes up much of their time, creative energy and social lives. It is an energetic outlet that, like any aerobic activity or peak experience, balances the mind, gives us an experience of oneness with the universe, and qualifies in many ways as a religious experience. It becomes so basic to our identities that we simply say, “I’m a bike rider”, and we cannot understand our lives without it. For our inner worlds BMX is everything.
But there comes a time when the body isn’t 18 anymore. And sorry kids, but that shit comes way quicker than you’d ever imagine so enjoy that dexterity and ability to heal while it lasts! One day that softball swelling in your ankle won’t go down in just a day. Now it takes a week. And that knee will never quite feel the same anymore. And all of a sudden there’s the herniated disc and the shooting pain down the legs. And you start to realize that your dream of living out eternity in cosmic union with your BMX bike will not come to pass. Old age and death are real. It’s a harsh moment of waking up to the impermanence of life.
People define themselves in all kinds of ways. We are symbolic beings and we need to create a world with meaning, what Ernest Becker calls an “immortality project.”[ii]The problem comes when something radically shifts in our world and that identity is shattered. This can be from the loss of a loved one, the loss of a job, or the loss of the thing we love to do more than anything else in the world. This is trauma in the most profound sense.
For someone that has dedicated their lives to freestyle, the move away from BMX is more traumatic than just about anything that can happen from BMX itself. All those good things I referenced above? Those begin to flicker away like a candle burning out. This transition may result from intractable injuries, lacking the physical capacity to compete with resilient 18 year olds, the need to provide for children or a family, moving away from the culture for a variety of other reasons, or simply being “over it”. Whatever the cause, it requires us to literally reinvent ourselves in many ways. All of the needs and desires that BMX satisfied may be lost, for a short time, a long time, or even forever. The harsh reality is that nothing will ever actually replace BMX. Nothing. Just like the loss of a lover or best friend, you simply can never get it back. And it requires us to truly grieve as if we had just lost a loved one we’ve known our whole lives. Then, those that move on from BMX successfully must reinvent a whole new life for themselves: new activities, ways of being creative, physically active, new social circles, ways of making money, new dreams. This is a mythological process of death and rebirth. While some riders go to school and/or get into a profession of some kind while they are still riding, for those that don’t the transition is even harder. The most amazing, game-changing edit is worth nothing on a resume outside of professional BMX. Now we have to face the harsh reality of survival in the society that BMX helped us avoid for so many years.
Suicide is an act of despair. From my experience and studies, I have no reason to believe it is some chemical defect. People end it when they have lost their identities, feel little or no social support or intimacy, and are so overwhelmed by pain, loneliness, and isolation that having no life appears like a viable alternative to the life they have been left with. At the same time, suicide does not actually occur in isolation. Junger talks eloquently about how for veterans, PTSD isn’t just about war but the culture they return home to (link in endnotes)[iii] What he means by this is that life is traumatic, period. No one can escape this. But what we can change is how we process it, and whether we process it or not in the first place. When veterans return home to a culture that doesn’t want to talk about feelings, a culture that will send them into the battlefield but then not want to hear one word about it when they get home, that puts them into existential solitary confinement. I would argue a similar dynamic exists in BMX. I would even go so far as to say that when a suicide happens in the BMX community, we are partially responsible for that death.
To what extent do we really listen to our friends? Do we create an open atmosphere for the kind of emotional pain that comes along with the various stages of a serious BMX career? Do we stay in contact with the guy that chooses to stop, or can no longer ride? I know that I am guilty of not being there for friends that were injured, depressed, turning to drugs, or psychotic. Would things have been different if I would have really reached out to them, rather than writing them off as my culture had taught me to do? As a kid, all I knew is that they used to love riding, they lit up in the most beautiful ways, and then somehow one day they were doing heroin or some other grimy shit - and not in a fun way. Our whole culture, blinded by materialism and macho-ism, has taught us to ignore some of the most important things about our shared experiences. As it turns out, all those people in the videos doing amazing tricks have deep and important feelings!
There’s so much more that could be said but the thesis of this article is that we should break the silence. Part of that might be really asking your friends questions about how they’re doing, whether after an injury, as they transition away from BMX, or just in general even if there isn’t anything obvious going on. I personally struggled hard with anxiety and depression in high school, having a deadbeat dad that disappeared, growing up with an emotionally unavailable mom, getting jumped, harassed, etc. I didn’t dare tell my friends about my feelings, I was SO ashamed, I felt like something was wrong with me, that I needed to be “tough”, whatever the fuck that means. For me it wasn’t primarily because of debilitating injuries or any obvious traumas, my life just felt shitty and I was having a hard time. I had no idea how much all that really hurt at the time.
It wasn’t until I became an adult that I learned how to process it. For whatever reason I made it through, but not without emotional wounds. Now, after a master’s degree and looking at a lot of statistics, I see that this isn’t at all unique to BMX - by all measures our society is fucking miserable and ironically we are supposed to act like everything is ok. We might need to redefine manhood as the heroic act of being soft and honest and move away from the macho posturing that defines BMX culture today. We could definitely work on the related issues of homophobia and sexism along the way too, but I don’t have time to go into that here.
Another element is that we simply need to communicate better to kids about what they are really getting into. In a way, the elders of BMX have colluded to not talk about what it’s like to age, get injured, and eventually give it up. The skewed picture BMX media presents effectively borders on lying. At least personally I know that as a kid I had some vague idea that I’d have to tone it down by, say, age 40. No one every bothered to tell me that by my late 20s my body would already be hitting its limits, that I’d be stuck with permanent back pain and the fear that I may not even be able to easily walk down the street one day. No one ever told me that doctors are quite limited in what they can do and that injuries never fully heal. So my injuries didn’t just come with physical pain but the emotional shock and surprise of being mentally unprepared. “Holy shit – I actually can’t do this forever... Fuck.” Informed consent is all about educating people about what is at stake so that they can make more conscious choices.
Personally I would love to see more documentary stories about how bike riders are making this transition, rather than just forgetting about them because they no longer have the physical resilience to stay on the front page of the news feed. If we really loved BMX, if we really respected the greatest innovators in our culture, we’d be curious about their whole lives and not just the moment they happened to film the latest crazy maneuver. This is just one example of a way our culture could begin engaging with these ideas. I challenge the immense creativity of our culture to come up with others.
Finally, the other thing bike riders can do as individuals is get professional help. Our friends and family can be loving and supportive but that can have its limits, especially for a high-level pro that can no longer hang at the top. "Normal" people often just don't understand that kind of transition. Some opinionated advice: You can’t just find any random psychotherapist. In all honesty, just like in any field most people aren’t very good at what they do and it’s helpful to get someone that specializes in whatever you are dealing with, just like you wouldn’t go to your primary care doctor for a knee replacement. The psychotherapist you choose should be one familiar with the importance of the body and athletic peak experiences. They should know how to work with trauma, high performing people and their unique challenges. If anyone has any questions about any of this, or would like to add their thoughts and experiences to this piece, feel free to leave comments below. I am also considering starting to do Skype sessions in my psychotherapy practice. Remote work isn’t ideal but if someone has no other options it's preferable to doing nothing.
Love,
Richard
ENDNOTES:
[i]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=td1PbsV6B80
[ii]Becker, Ernest. The Denial of Death. New York: Free Press, 1973.
[iii]http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/05/ptsd-war-home-sebastian-junger
Responses
8.7.19 - Ross Lavender
After reading Richard Mungall’s article about BMX and Mental Health, I felt compelled to write something to add to the discussion.
When I think about BMX, I can’t compare it to anything else. When I try to define my thirty plus years in BMX ‘as a sport’ the word “survived” comes to mind. Not in some douchey kind of way, but in a sense that the BMX way of life has been a beautiful, incredible and yet turbulent and traumatic experience. While we mostly reflect of the awesome times we’ve had riding over the years, it is fair to say that it hasn’t exactly been smooth ride either. As a relatively young sub-culture and with many of us moving towards our mid-life, the BMX community hasn’t fully understood the psychological effects of living in a non-structured way of life (freestyle).
I want to share both my personal experiences as a rider and also what I have learnt interviewing many riders now in their 40s and 50s; and what I have learnt about mental health issues within BMX. But it’s not just the older generation. I have seen our younger riders and up and coming Pros fall victim to the same issues. Are we going to let them follow the same path or is there something we can do as a community to help today’s riders? As Richard mentioned, by bringing awareness and conversation to the table, we can hopefully change the culture of mental health in BMX.
I was 16 in 1995 and part of the main scene here in Brisbane, Australia. The scene consisted of ramp riders, street riders, dirt jumpers, and flatlanders that rode with each other some weekdays-but mostly on weekends. We were all tight irrespective of our riding styles and as a community we relied on each other because we were slowly rebuilding our scene after the BMX recession.
On a Sunday night I was cramming to finish an assignment due the next day when I received a call from one of our crew telling me one of our riders had committed suicide. To my knowledge, the rider went to his brother’s house for the weekend, took one of his brother’s rifles, and shot himself in the head. Being on the end of that phone call and being told that as a 16-year-old, stopped me in my tracks. How do you respond to that? I didn’t. We didn’t talk about how we felt or ask each other if ‘you are okay’. We changed the subject, arranged meeting times for the funeral and got off the phone. I went back to doing my assignment in anger and went to bed.
The next day the world had literally changed. The sky, the clouds, everything I saw was in a heightened state and in the following weeks, I couldn’t control my emotions. Anger, sadness and depression all rolled in and my teenage body couldn’t comprehend the loss I was feeling.
That Wednesday our scene met up and we went to his funeral. By dealing with it we made light of a situation, by joking ‘we would be meeting our dead friend there at the funeral’. We had a shaving cream and toilet paper fight between our convoy of cars on the trip back and rode a friends Vert ramp in our funeral clothes and ate ice-cream. That’s how we dealt with it. Yet, as a riding family and community we never talked about how we were feeling or really dealt with the grief. The emotions were swept under the rug for the most part and we got on with life.
To be honest, there wasn’t any suicide prevention back then and we were all young in our teens and early 20s and not equipped to deal with a violent suicide. Even today as a 40-year-old, I still struggle with my friends loss and believe I haven’t completely grieved over his death.
A couple of years later another rider suddenly passed away. Then a year or two later another rider died from a cocktail of mental health issues and a drug overdose. In these 20 plus years there has been more deaths within our scene, mostly contributed from mental health issues and the inability to deal trauma we were exposed to through BMX.
In the past seven years, when interviewing riders from the 80s and 90s eras I have seen a lot of broken riders. Substance abuse, mental health issues, rough home situations, and damaged family relationships – the stories are different but for the most part the core issues are the same. They often refer to their years riding as their golden years, while they struggle today with these issues and assimilating into a ‘normal’ life outside of BMX. Then, there are other riders who have fallen so far, and their mental health is that bad, that they live in halfway houses and are wards of the state.
As Richard mentioned in his article, there is a PTSD within BMX. When we get into BMX we are usually in our adolescence and our teenage years, and we are still developing healthy mental foundations. The things we see, and experience while we’re out riding are things most ‘normal’ youth wouldn’t necessarily be exposed to. Psychologically there is little protecting us and at times we are ill-equipped to deal with some of the more traumatic experiences.
To me, BMX is a way of life and it has taken me many years to understand this. BMX and my riding community are my family. We grow together, we support each other to achieve goals and we are there to praise each other when we learn a new trick or when they start a new BMX company or brand. I am especially protective of my riding family, our culture, our history, and what my friends have done to make BMX what it is today; and that’s because the road has been tough and we have survived through our experiences. You cannot buy that and you certainly cannot recreate it. But I often wonder what else can we do as a BMX community to start helping our own people who are struggling?
After reading Richard Mungall’s article about BMX and Mental Health, I felt compelled to write something to add to the discussion.
When I think about BMX, I can’t compare it to anything else. When I try to define my thirty plus years in BMX ‘as a sport’ the word “survived” comes to mind. Not in some douchey kind of way, but in a sense that the BMX way of life has been a beautiful, incredible and yet turbulent and traumatic experience. While we mostly reflect of the awesome times we’ve had riding over the years, it is fair to say that it hasn’t exactly been smooth ride either. As a relatively young sub-culture and with many of us moving towards our mid-life, the BMX community hasn’t fully understood the psychological effects of living in a non-structured way of life (freestyle).
I want to share both my personal experiences as a rider and also what I have learnt interviewing many riders now in their 40s and 50s; and what I have learnt about mental health issues within BMX. But it’s not just the older generation. I have seen our younger riders and up and coming Pros fall victim to the same issues. Are we going to let them follow the same path or is there something we can do as a community to help today’s riders? As Richard mentioned, by bringing awareness and conversation to the table, we can hopefully change the culture of mental health in BMX.
I was 16 in 1995 and part of the main scene here in Brisbane, Australia. The scene consisted of ramp riders, street riders, dirt jumpers, and flatlanders that rode with each other some weekdays-but mostly on weekends. We were all tight irrespective of our riding styles and as a community we relied on each other because we were slowly rebuilding our scene after the BMX recession.
On a Sunday night I was cramming to finish an assignment due the next day when I received a call from one of our crew telling me one of our riders had committed suicide. To my knowledge, the rider went to his brother’s house for the weekend, took one of his brother’s rifles, and shot himself in the head. Being on the end of that phone call and being told that as a 16-year-old, stopped me in my tracks. How do you respond to that? I didn’t. We didn’t talk about how we felt or ask each other if ‘you are okay’. We changed the subject, arranged meeting times for the funeral and got off the phone. I went back to doing my assignment in anger and went to bed.
The next day the world had literally changed. The sky, the clouds, everything I saw was in a heightened state and in the following weeks, I couldn’t control my emotions. Anger, sadness and depression all rolled in and my teenage body couldn’t comprehend the loss I was feeling.
That Wednesday our scene met up and we went to his funeral. By dealing with it we made light of a situation, by joking ‘we would be meeting our dead friend there at the funeral’. We had a shaving cream and toilet paper fight between our convoy of cars on the trip back and rode a friends Vert ramp in our funeral clothes and ate ice-cream. That’s how we dealt with it. Yet, as a riding family and community we never talked about how we were feeling or really dealt with the grief. The emotions were swept under the rug for the most part and we got on with life.
To be honest, there wasn’t any suicide prevention back then and we were all young in our teens and early 20s and not equipped to deal with a violent suicide. Even today as a 40-year-old, I still struggle with my friends loss and believe I haven’t completely grieved over his death.
A couple of years later another rider suddenly passed away. Then a year or two later another rider died from a cocktail of mental health issues and a drug overdose. In these 20 plus years there has been more deaths within our scene, mostly contributed from mental health issues and the inability to deal trauma we were exposed to through BMX.
In the past seven years, when interviewing riders from the 80s and 90s eras I have seen a lot of broken riders. Substance abuse, mental health issues, rough home situations, and damaged family relationships – the stories are different but for the most part the core issues are the same. They often refer to their years riding as their golden years, while they struggle today with these issues and assimilating into a ‘normal’ life outside of BMX. Then, there are other riders who have fallen so far, and their mental health is that bad, that they live in halfway houses and are wards of the state.
As Richard mentioned in his article, there is a PTSD within BMX. When we get into BMX we are usually in our adolescence and our teenage years, and we are still developing healthy mental foundations. The things we see, and experience while we’re out riding are things most ‘normal’ youth wouldn’t necessarily be exposed to. Psychologically there is little protecting us and at times we are ill-equipped to deal with some of the more traumatic experiences.
To me, BMX is a way of life and it has taken me many years to understand this. BMX and my riding community are my family. We grow together, we support each other to achieve goals and we are there to praise each other when we learn a new trick or when they start a new BMX company or brand. I am especially protective of my riding family, our culture, our history, and what my friends have done to make BMX what it is today; and that’s because the road has been tough and we have survived through our experiences. You cannot buy that and you certainly cannot recreate it. But I often wonder what else can we do as a BMX community to start helping our own people who are struggling?