Former Roush Fenway Racing car chief Jason Myers talks about his battle with depression

Jason Myers could put up a front as the car chief for Carl Edwards. He could pretend that there wasn’t anything wrong with him as he went about his work and did his job for a Roush Fenway Racing team that was challenging for the NASCAR Sprint Cup title.

But when he would get to his room during the race weekend or was just sitting at home on his day off, Myers says things weren’t so good. It wouldn’t matter if the No. 99 car had a good day or bad day in practice or the race.

“You just sort of feel like, hopeless,” Myers says. “Hopeless was the best word I can think of. You just feel like your life is kind of crappy. … It just gets a little worse the more time that goes on. You don’t ever express anything. Everything just stays inside. You just keep it inside.”

Myers was suffering from depression, although he says he didn’t realize it at first when the feelings began midway through the 2007 season. He says the depression eventually led to three suicide attempts, the most serious one coming less than a week before the 2009 Daytona 500 and hospitalizing him for three days.

Within a week, Myers says he had been fired, which he claims in a lawsuit was in violation of the Family Medical Leave Act. Roush Fenway Racing President Geoff Smith, while declining to talk about the specific reasons why Myers was released, calls the lawsuit frivolous and says that in these tough economic times, people will sue after being released. Smith says that he’s “surprised Jason wishes to publicly expose all the facts surrounding his private life, his working life and how they are interrelated instead of simply moving on” and that the team is “going to let all the facts play out in court.”

Whether the team had other reasons to release him or whether Myers has a legitimate legal claim might not be revealed for more than a year. Roush Fenway Racing, which moved this week to have the case transferred out of a North Carolina state court to federal court, still must respond to the lawsuit. and then both sides likely would enter an investigative phase into Myers’ claims, go through mediation, and, if there is no settlement, have the issue decided by a judge or jury.

But beyond the legal battle and beyond whether the team had legitimate reasons to release him, Myers tells a story of a 31-year-old father of two who may not be the only crew member battling with depression. According to the Centers for Disease Control, 5.4 percent of the U.S. population battles depression at any given time. Of those with severe depression, only 40 percent seek treatment.

Dr. John F. Murray, a clinical sports psychologist based in Palm Beach, Fla. who works extensively with tennis players as well as athletes in other sports, says that while athletes as a whole do not battle depression as much as the general public, it still can be a problem.

“Athletes are people, just like anybody else,” Murray says. “Depression is a very common mental illness. … Athletes are overall a little bit healthier than the general population, but absolutely you’re going to see depression, you’re going to see anxiety, you’re going to see any number of possibilities among any group of athletes because they’re people.”

From the outside, Myers’ life looked as if he should have no reason to be depressed. He worked on one of the top teams in the Sprint Cup, and he had changed tires until suffering an injury early in the 2008 season. But many athletes have battled depression, including football star Terry Bradshaw.

“Take [actor] Owen Wilson; he struggled with it really bad,” Myers says. “He’s a movie star. He has made lots of money. Why does it affect him? It doesn’t matter who you are or what you’re doing.”

Myers’ first suicide attempt came in March 2008, when he says he tried to overdose on Tylenol. He continued to work with many of his co-workers, many of them oblivious to the suicide attempt.

“Right after the first attempt, you feel, I guess, lucky that I’m glad that didn’t work out,” Myers says. “For a short time after that, you feel better. You want to take things more seriously, and you just feel like, I’m lucky it happened and I’m still alive; that’s great.

“So I just kept seeing my therapist weekly, but then … it just starts coming back, and you start going downhill again.”

Myers says he aborted a suicide attempt in October 2008, but then on Feb. 10, 2009, he ingested 25-30 Tylenol along with approximately 200 units of insulin, which he has because he is a diabetic, in another suicide attempt that hospitalized him for three days.

“Just that hopelessness, it just keeps coming and coming,” Myers says. “You finally get into a place where you just really believe that [suicide] is the only way that’s going to make things any better. You just feel like that’s the only answer.”

By speaking out now about battling depression, Myers says he hopes that other crewmen in his situation won’t hesitate to seek help.

“Hopefully, this will also bring awareness to the sport itself [about depression],” says Myers, who would not talk about exactly when he was diagnosed with depression or the exact causes because of the lawsuit. “I guess I could see somebody else ending up in the same position that I was, where you put getting help sort of on the back burner, and before you know it, you end up in the hospital or something like that.

“I just think that it’s definitely something that needs to be taken seriously by everyone.”

Just getting help for depression is tough for athletes, who often take their health seriously. Blow out a knee? Rehab as much as possible and get back in the game. Depression? Worry about it later. That’s what Myers did at first.

“In sports, there’s almost a feeling of invulnerability or self-reliance, that you shouldn’t be depressed,” Murray says. “Athletes tend to pull themselves up and do it on their own. They’re rugged individuals. That’s unfortunate because you can’t pull yourself out of serious depression. … Somehow in our society, we’ve made the conclusion that if a person has depression or any kind of mental illness, that’s a slant on their character, a mark on their integrity or they’re somehow not strong enough.

“That’s ridiculous. But where does it come from? Think back to history when we used to lock [people with mental illnesses] up, put them in a dungeon and tell them they have evil spirits throughout their bodies. Athletes are supposed to be superman or superwoman. They don’t want to say they’ve got depression because they think everybody will think they’re not strong, they’re weak. But the truth is they’ll have more debilitation from that than a broken leg.”

Myers says it didn’t matter whether he was home or on the road, whether it was the midseason or offseason, the depression would hit.

“You still have the same feelings,” Myers says. “It takes a toll on you even being a father, not doing as much with your kids as you probably should have, just sort of laying around, not doing much. … You’re really down on yourself, just sort of feel like you’re not good enough at anything that you do.

“You’re just not real, not super excited to wake up the next morning, you know what I mean?”

Myers says he doesn’t believe that the pressures of the job contributed to his depression nor did it impact how he did his job. And he also says it was the other way around as well in that the performance aspect of the job didn’t trigger his depression.

Myers also doesn’t think that his being moved out of the car chief role in favor of Pierre Kuettel after last season aggravated the condition, even though he said it was tough to swallow despite acknowledging that Kuettel’s experience would be a benefit to the team.

Murray says that it is normal for there to be no correlation between performance and depression.

“Performance might be the least of their worries,” Murray says. “There is a lot of evidence that depression is both genetic as well as environmental. There could be some sort of trigger or threshold of stress that could possibly kick it in, but most of the time, you’re talking about something over which a person has virtually no control.

“It kind of takes over you, and you definitely need help. If you’ve got major depression, performance is ridiculous trivia. It’s nothing compared to that.”

Not having worked since February, Myers still watches races on television and listens to radio traffic between Edwards and Osborne. He talks to a few of his former teammates occasionally. His wife is working two jobs while he stays home with the kids.

“I try to keep myself pretty busy around the house,” Myers says. “You still have your days where I could easily just lay on the couch all day and not do anything and just sit there and feel bad about yourself.

“But I’m just really trying to keep myself busy with housework and yard work, take advantage of the summer while the kids are out of school and doing things with them.”

If he returns to racing, Myers says he would rather have a shop job so he could focus on himself.

“I would definitely not want to travel and [would] just take a shop job because this is something that you have to keep working at it and seeing your therapist,” Myers says. “It’s not going to go away. I would definitely want to stay at home, and that way I could still focus on myself instead of letting it slip away again.”