Tyler Lockett reveals he’s played through depression, anxiety in his best Seahawks years
Tyler Lockett has made more than $50 million playing football.
He holds the Seahawks’ record for receptions in a season; he had 100 catches in 2020. The 29-year-old Lockett began his career in 2015 as an All-Pro and Pro Bowl selection while a rookie for Seattle.
He’s been one of the most successful wide receivers in the NFL.
Yet while excelling among the world’s best at what he does and earning generational wealth with the Seahawks, Lockett has battled and played through depression and anxiety.
He revealed that this week.
Lockett spoke at length following Tuesday’s practice during offseason organized team activities about the importance of mental health. He talked of the mental-health initiative he and his team started this week within a realm of professional sports — and society — that has largely been ignored for decades.
“Yeah, I feel like it is changing. But I feel like we’re moving really, really slowly,” Lockett said Tuesday.
“There are people that are just committing suicide, and they have a whole bunch of life ahead of them.
“It’s just hard because everybody feels like they have to get to this place now — like, ‘I have to be married in my 20s, I have to have millions of dollars, I have to be successful.’ And it’s just hard to keep up because at one point growing up, a million dollars was a lot — but now everybody wants 10. It’s ongoing. It never stops.
“At some point, we have to be able to take a step back and ask ourselves ‘Who are we competing against? Am I competing with other people, am I competing against myself? Or am I just living life to be able to get where I think I need to be?’” Lockett said.
He and his teammates were wearing white Seahawks team T-shirts after practice Tuesday with “Mental Health Matters” printed on the front.
Wednesday, Lockett revealed why he continues to speak about and raise awareness of mental health.
“2 years out of my 7 years in the NFL thus far I played through depression and anxiety and almost quit and had my best year,” he wrote on his Twitter account online. “I played through trauma another year and had my best year. Moral of the story: Just keep going. You never know what’s waiting on the other side!”
Bulling through
In the spring of 2020, the coronavirus pandemic was shutting down America — but not the NFL. Lockett considering opting out of the league season that fall into winter.
Lockett feared contracting COVID during the Seahawks’ trips and hotel stays to play road games, and then putting vulnerable family members and friends at greater risk.
He ultimately decided to play his sixth NFL season. It was his best one yet.
He broke Doug Baldwin’s and Bobby Engram’s franchise record when he had 100 receptions in 2020, on a career-high 132 targets. His 10 touchdown passes from Russell Wilson tied Lockett’s career best. His 57 first downs were his most in an NFL season. Lockett also had his second consecutive year with over 1,000 yards receiving (1,054) for the second time in his six-year career.
Lockett now says he did all that after almost quitting because of his mental health.
In 2021 he re-signed with the Seahawks for four years, through the 2026 season, with $37 million guaranteed. Last season Lockett joined Hall of Famer Steve Largent as the only Seahawks with three straight seasons with 1,000 yards receiving.
“Looking back now I’m so happy I kept going,” Lockett wrote on Twitter Wednesday. “I’m a strong minded person and when faced with mental health situations I tried to hurry up and fix it like if I got hurt and practice got treatment for a day and I’m good. But with mental health you have to be real with yourself.”
Lockett wants all of us to be real with ourselves, and our minds.
“I think that just talking about mental health is very important,” he said, “because we just kind of live in a world, society, and generation where we feel like everything has to be gratifying right now. We have to be successful. We have to look good. We have to play good. There is no room for error. We can’t make mistakes in this generation. We have to be exactly what everybody else thinks we should be.
“And I think that it’s having a toll on us mentally because it gets harder and harder because we are putting these unrealistic expectations on ourselves. And now we are starting to find ourselves depressed, because we are comparing ourselves to what some people have, and what we don’t have.”
Destigmatizing mental health
The Seahawks started their Mental Health Matters initiative this week. It seeks to destigmatize and normalize mental-health concerns, and encourage conversations about the subject.
Cornerback Sidney Jones is another Seattle player who has acknowledged fighting through depression and anxiety. The former University of Washington Husky tore his Achilles tendon at his UW pro day just before his NFL draft in 2017. As he told the Seahawks’ team website, he got help from a therapist. Last season Jones played for Seattle wearing custom pink shoes with the name and logo of the non-profit Mental Health America for the league’s My Cause, My Cleats week.
“It’s really important to me because it’s something I’ve been through personally,” Jones told seahawks.com.
“I sustained the Achilles injury before the draft, and that was a big shock for me. First surgery, first major injury, and that took me through some dark times. I tried to stay positive about it, but I had a moment where I just didn’t feel like myself, and that was weighing on me. I didn’t notice I needed help until maybe a couple of years down the road, and I never really got a chance to talk about it.
“But coming out of that, coming out of that dark space, I got some help, talked to a therapist and figured out a way.”
Lockett, three years older than Jones, knows he and Jones talking openly about mental health and struggles with it still are not the norm in pro sports. Or for people their age.
“The tough part about this world and like I said, this generation, is that it’s not allowing us to be vulnerable, because when we are vulnerable and we do talk about things, people use it against us,” Lockett said. “They laugh at it. They talk about it, and they use it for whatever is necessary to fit their narratives or opinions, when there’s real people that are hurting. There are real people that are looking for help and need a safe place.
“I just feel like for us to be able to start this, you have to be able to have a safe place and have somebody be able to listen, but you can’t just wait until somebody commits suicide, you can’t just wait until somebody passes away to say that we have to start talking about mental health because this is what we need to do. We need to take action so those things don’t happen, and I just feel like these are the necessary steps to take to allow people to have that safe place.
“If it’s not publicly, then we can have it privately.”
This story was originally published June 2, 2022 at 5:35 AM with the headline "Tyler Lockett reveals he’s played through depression, anxiety in his best Seahawks years."
