National football team: Gosen’s appeal: mental illnesses are “no trivialities”

National player Robin Gosens has urgently appealed for a more open approach to depression. “It is courageous when you open yourself up, it is not weakness when you go out into the world,” said Gosens. “We shouldn’t be met with hatred and rejection, but rather with an embrace from society and with encouragement and: ‘I’m here for you’.” Society must “absolutely get to the point where it is normal to talk about it.”

Gosens will play with the national soccer team in the final group games of the Nations League on Saturday (8.45 p.m./RTL) in Freiburg against Bosnia-Herzegovina and three days later in Budapest against Hungary (8.45 p.m./ZDF). The 30-year-old from Fiorentina studied psychology and has been committed to this topic for a “very long time”. “It is incredibly important, still has too little importance in professional football and has too many stigmas in society as a whole,” said Gosens.

Mental illnesses “no trivialities”

Depression “and mental illnesses in general are very serious illnesses, not trivialities,” said Gosens. “Only when it becomes normal to talk about it do we have the opportunity for people to open up and seek help. There’s no point in dwelling on the issues and that’s why I’m happy to stand up for these issues, I think you also have to act as a role model.”

In this context, hate comments on the Internet are “poison on top of that,” said the winger. Everyone has to deal with this “every day”. “The anonymity of the Internet is very often abused for terrible comments,” said Gosens, in which it is often forgotten that behind the players “there is still a person who has feelings, who may be broken by it, who is very affected by it “wishing him death if you wish death on your family.”

He could only urge “that before you make such a shitty comment, maybe think about it for a moment and think about what it could trigger in others,” said Gosens.