We’ve still got a way to go in this area and I think we’ve got even further to go in our sphere professional sport.

Like everyone, I was deeply saddened to hear about Majak Daw and what he’s gone through this week.

It really opens your eyes to what athletes go through. People often say ‘how are lucky are you’ and they’re right, we’re all so lucky to make our living out of the sport we love.

However, that privilege doesn’t make anyone less human or more immune to mental health issues.

In fact, elite athletes work in an environment that’s almost certain to exacerbate them.

When you make a living in sport you have to accept that you’re public property, but it doesn’t mitigate the internal struggles people go through. 

People think ‘oh they’re full-time sportsman, they get paid really good money’ but with that comes so much more expectation and scrutiny. 

There’s a lot more pressure on the athlete these days to perform. When they don’t perform they cop so much abuse and, in the social media age, there’s no filter.

That's before you even look at athletes transitioning out of sport, which doesn’t always occur on their own terms. 

They’re lauded as heroes and all of a sudden the career’s over and they’re left asking – what do I do now? They can really suffer from a lot of depression and anxiety.

I’ve been coaching for 26 years and I have personally dealt with players battling suicidal thoughts. 

It’s a taboo topic. It’s becoming less so but it’s a reality. 

I’ve been with guys down at the beach at midnight, I’ve had phones calls from concerned parents, I’ve had search parties out looking for people and I’ve been on suicide watch with players.

Sportspeople are big tough heroes, the minute you say there’s something wrong mentally, they’re soft. It’s a perception tat’s hard to shake and we need to do a lot better job of supporting them. 

We have sports psychologists and education programs and all these sorts of things, but most of what we do is geared towards performance.

We talk about developing mental strength to face the challenges on the court or out on the field.

Life’s challenges are whole lot tougher and being in the professional sports bubble doesn’t prepare you for them.

We have to do a better job in the sporting industry of looking after athletes mental welfare away from sport and help develop them as people.

I look at the wonderful things Greg Hire’s done with Stitch in Time.

We all know people with mental health issues and he’s doing something about it. We heed more of it.

We do educational programs and all the rest, but we just seem to touch on these things. It’s all to often a ‘tick the box’ type scenario.

It’s something I put on myself and say I need to do a better job of as a coach. One of the things we did last year as a club was an in-house mentor program.

We put our guys in small groups for the whole season. They had to meet once a week to go over the scout, get some shots up and all the other little things that go into preparation.

One big non-negotiable rule we had was that the very first question they asked of each other had to be – are you OK? I think we’ve all got to do a better job of asking that question?