Salemo, a former U.S. U19 training team player from Heritage High in Littleton, Colo., prefaces her story with how great her childhood was. Her parents are still together. She has a sister, who now plays club lacrosse at Colorado State, and there were no traumatic events in her life.


In second grade, Salemo started feeling “very deep sadness and a disconnect from everyone else in the world.” By fifth grade, those feelings evolved into thoughts of suicide. She started acting out and spent much of middle school in the principal’s office. No one knew it was more than just typical teenage angst.


“Anna was so above average, so much better than pretty much all the other athletes I coached, but she was always hard on herself, and her perception of what success and failure was didn’t match up with the level of her performance,” says Team 180 director Sam Bartron, Salemo’s club coach since second grade. “It came effortlessly for her, but she put huge amounts of pressure on herself, so it was hard to tell what was going on. She hid what she was feeling from everyone.” In high school, Salemo found


temporary relief through alcohol. But by her senior year, thoughts of suicide became more prevalent, “more overbearing, more overwhelming,” she says. She felt like the world around her wasn’t real. She felt lonely.


In December 2010, Salemo finally opened up to some friends. She doesn’t remember exactly what she said, but recalls dropping subtle hints that she was thinking of killing herself. They informed school officials. That led to her first trip to a psychiatric ward — a 15-day stay at Highlands Behavioral Health. She met with doctors, attended group therapy and did a lot of sitting


18 LACROSSE MAGAZINE »APRIL 2016


and waiting — waiting for the next meal, waiting for time to pass. Salemo continued treatment, saw more doctors, underwent more therapy and thought she was on her way to recovery. To this day, at age 23, she doesn’t drink.


The following fall, Salemo headed off to Stanford, despite Bartron warning that she was not ready. After two weeks, the suicidal thoughts started creeping back in, and one night, while laying on the floor of her dorm room, Salemo texted her residential advisor, saying she was scared.


Salemo spent the next 10 days in the psych ward again, this time at Stanford Hospital, and was forced to take the rest of the year off from school, and thus, lacrosse. From October to December that year, she lived in an outpatient group home with other mental health patients, then moved back to Colorado and continued her recovery, while also holding a job as a canvasser. Salemo’s diagnoses over the years have included bipolar disorder, general anxiety disorder and major depression, but she is hesitant to put her experiences in medical terms for fear it could prevent others from relating or understanding. There already are enough misconceptions about mental health issues among society, she says. Dr. Sam O’Connell, a licensed clinical psychologist who has been working with athletes for 15 years, says depression and anxiety are no more common among athletes than non-athletes. However,


athletes, especially elite ones, tend to deal with mental health issues differently because they are “trained to really tough it out and play through some excruciating circumstances,” O'Connell says. It often takes longer for athletes to realize or admit they need help. “Some of the things that make athletes


wonderful can be the very thing that make them unrealistic perfectionists,” said O’Connell, a former athlete who is on staff at the Integrated Center for Child Development in Canton, Mass., and also serves as an outpatient therapist. “Hard work and pushing through is essential for them, especially in today’s society, but that can lead to pushing through different emotional experiences, as well, versus dealing with them in a healthy way.” Salemo had never told her coaches or teammates at Stanford of her experiences, in part because she thought she was OK and also for fear she would be treated differently. When Salemo's teammates visited her in the psych ward — a place she says most people probably don’t want to go — and in the group home, she began to realize how much they cared about her. With some encouragement from those closest to her, Salemo decided to return to Stanford in fall 2012 — this time without lacrosse. “I took a light course load, and I said


if fall quarter doesn’t go well, if things go poorly, I’m done with Stanford,” Salemo says. “Things went well in the fall, and I said the same about winter, and it’s been good since.”


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