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Miedema and Mead in conversation: Arsenal stars discuss panic attacks and injury anguish (x)

Panic attacks are terrifying. They can come out of nowhere. Can cause you to physically shake. Take your breath away. Bring on intense nausea.

The first time you have one, you might even think you are dying.

And they can happen to absolutely anybody.

“It’s mostly anxiety that triggers them for me,” Arsenal striker Vivianne Miedema tells The Athletic. She started experiencing panic attacks after winning the European Championship with the Netherlands in the summer of 2017 — a high that was followed by her move from Bayern Munich to Arsenal.

Her profile had skyrocketed and, with it, so had her anxiety.

In those early days, an attack would leave her physically and mentally exhausted for days. She would miss training sessions, unable to raise herself from the sofa.

Today, Miedema, 27, says the panic attacks are mostly “under control”.

She goes on to say: “But sometimes I still need to tell Beth (Mead, her fellow Arsenal striker, with whom Miedema is in a relationship), ‘Keep chatting to me, because I do feel really stressed’, or ‘I do feel really anxious��, and that can be in a lot of different environments.”

It’s at this moment that another voice can be heard on the line.

“You don’t need to ask me to keep talking…” it chuckles. It is Mead; a renowned chatterbox.

“Oh no, you don’t,” replies Miedema, in her typically deadpan way… “Bloody hell, I need to tell her to shut up.”

The couple are in different countries as we speak: Miedema away on international duty with the Netherlands and Mead, 28, at home in north London, excused from the Lionesses’ recent double header against Belgium to allow her to focus on her return to fitness from the ACL injury she suffered last year.

But they have come together (via the magic of WhatsApp) to discuss a topic that unites them just as much as the game they both love: mental health. Both are part of Common Goal’s new initiative Create the Space, which aims to create an environment in football where everyone is able and encouraged to express themselves.

“I actually think the first time I had it was when I moved to Arsenal in 2017,” says Mead. “I was 21, and though I knew there was something not quite right, at the time there wasn’t someone telling you, ‘Actually, you maybe have a few issues’.”

Mead had said goodbye to Sunderland, the club she’d joined as a 16-year-old and moved south to join Arsenal, a five-hour-plus drive away from her family and friends. When she arrived in London, she was carrying an injury which meant her time on the pitch was limited.

“Football is really important for me; it helps me refresh and switch off from things in the world. I didn’t have that coming into a new environment and I really struggled for quite a long time.

“At the time, I just blamed it on me being young and needing to be more mature, but actually that’s not the case. Now I think it was OK to not feel OK in those circumstances.”

When Norwich City released a video as part of World Mental Health Day last month (below), Mead found herself nodding in recognition at the message it delivered: to check in on those around you, however they might seem.

“That was probably your best definition of mental health issues,” she says. “You’ve got someone who is very outgoing like myself and then the other person is a little bit more introverted, like a Viv, and you don’t know what’s going on with people.”

Growing up, Miedema’s approach to dealing with difficult feelings was to close herself off from them. To push them so far down inside herself that she could almost forget they were there.

“I realised quite early on that I had to change that,” she says. “But I didn’t really do anything with it. Where I grew up, in the north of Holland, mental health or not being OK was not a ‘done thing’. You had to be good. You had to enjoy things. Then when I moved to an environment in Munich (Miedema signed for Bayern in June 2014, one month shy of her 18th birthday), it was very strict and it wasn’t about how you were feeling at all.

“I remember going to the coach saying ‘I feel like it’s been too much for me. I might need a bit more time.’ And it was like, ‘No, you need to train harder because then you’ll forget about things. You get tired and your mind doesn’t need to overwork’. But my mind doesn’t work like that.

“So when I moved to Arsenal and we got the opportunity to actually speak with someone (a sports psychologist), I was a bit like, ‘Oh, am I going to do it? Do I need it? What can I expect?’. Because it was never OK for me to even think about going to see someone or speak with someone.”

When she started experiencing panic attacks, Miedema knew she had to open up. Though she’s not working with the club’s psychologist now, she worked with the previous one for five years.

“That was my way out. And I always say that probably the proudest moment of my career so far is making that step: to actually take care of myself, take care of my mental state and not just the physical state.”

It’s not something that is ever really “gone” though, Miedema says.

“Three or four years later, you’ll still have a panic attack and then you’re like, ‘Oh, I’m going to fall back into that old rhythm, or am I going to speak with someone to hope that ultimately it sorts itself out again?’.

“That’s the part where it becomes really important that you keep checking in with yourself and the people around you. So that before it gets too bad again, you jump on it and make sure you take care of yourself early enough.”

Miedema was with her previous partner when the panic attacks first started. When she got together with Mead, she made sure to be as open as possible about what she might need.

“I remember having a conversation with Beth and basically saying, ‘This is how I sometimes am. This is how you can help me. But other moments, I don’t know if you can help me, just make sure that you’re there for me’.

“I can only say to Beth that she’s been amazing in that way and really helps me through the moments that I do struggle. That’s what we want to put out there now; to make sure that it’s something that’s going to be shared with other people. So, if you do struggle, say it to your team-mates, to your friends, to your family. Don’t hold it in just for yourself.”

For Mead, it has been a learning process. But one that has helped her as much as it has Miedema.

“Looking at Viv in comparison to myself, I’m someone who pushes things under the rug and keeps it within me and then I struggle inside, but my exterior isn’t (showing it),” she says. “Whereas I see physically with Viv how she’s feeling. And sometimes that’s really hard for me to understand.

“Over time, I’ve grown to understand it better. We still have days where I’m like, ‘What do you need from me? Because I still don’t know’. Sometimes Viv doesn’t know herself what she needs. But if I’m here and being present and trying to make Viv present as much as possible, I think that’s an important process.

“Sometimes it’s hard to put your finger on what is the right thing to do, and that’s OK. Between the two of us, we figure something out.”

After the high of winning the European Championship with England last summer, Mead was hit with the low of rupturing her ACL last November — an injury that cast major doubt on her role at this summer’s World Cup. She was heartbroken.

Three weeks later, Miedema tore her ACL too. For the next nine months or so, they would be travelling the same path. Dealing with the same demons.

“I was given sympathy for 3 weeks and now she has to go get some of her own,” wrote Mead in an Instagram post following Miedema’s injury. “But we got this, YOU got this. 2 new signings incoming @/viviannemiedema.”

Less than a month after that post, Mead lost her mum, June, to cancer. It was the hardest time of her life. Without football to occupy her mind and body, she was lost.

“Everybody uses things in different ways. Football was my outlet. It was my happy place. It was my place to switch off. I lost my mum and I wasn’t able to play football. It’s not that I ever want to forget about her, but just to have those moments where it switched off for a second. That’s where I’ve had to grow and learn to process things a little differently. I can’t just escape through football.”

Miedema, she says, has been “amazing. Sometimes people think I’m fine, but I have those moments at home that just Viv would see…”. Mead also credits her close family members and team-mates for helping her through the last 10 months. “Without them, it could have been a much, much darker time than it already was.”

Keeping on top of their mental health over the past year or so has been a constant management process for both players.

For Miedema, that has involved speaking up when she felt physically and mentally unable to compete at her usual level. The Netherlands’ record goalscorer caught Covid-19 during Euro 2022, leaving her bed-bound for 10 days, and after struggling through the early part of the season with her club, she hit a wall.

“Physically, I didn’t feel right,” she says. “And if you don’t feel right physically, your burden becomes even more on your mental health. I just couldn’t do it anymore. I woke up in the mornings and I thought, ‘S***, I need to go to training again. I don’t want to do it’.”

After conversations with her national team coach Andries Jonker and Arsenal boss Jonas Eidevall, it was agreed that Miedema would take two weeks off. “I went to the other side of the world, which was bloody brilliant. But I really needed it. If I had gone on like that, I don’t know if I would have still wanted to play football.”

Miedema is aware that she’s in something of a privileged position when it comes to asking for time off — something a younger, less experienced player might feel less comfortable doing. She is also aware of how rare it is for a player to take time away from the game without being forced to by injury; something she hopes her actions can help to change.

“I still get asked about it in interviews and people still mention it around me like, ‘Oh, she took a break for her mental health’. So it’s clearly not a normal thing.

“I hope to be an example in that way. Something I always say to all my team-mates and the young girls coming through is that ‘Your mental health is the very first thing to actually being a footballer and being successful. So take care of that first’.”

As the women’s game continues to grow, Mead and Miedema believe it’s a message that carries more importance than ever.

“Everybody deals with things differently,” says Mead. “Whether it’s internally or externally. That’s something that I’ve learned with me and Viv dealing with things quite opposite.

“And like Viv said earlier, it’s not something that’s just going to go away. We’ve both come through ACL injuries. We don’t just come back in and we think we’re perfect. We’ve got to do little things daily that help our knees. And we’ve got to do things daily that help us mentally too. It’s the same whether it’s an actual injury, or whether it’s mental health.

“It’s been a learning process for us. And we’re not perfect, but we’re better than we used to be.”

While for some, speaking with a psychologist or having time off might be necessary, Miedema also wants to spread the message that sometimes, mental health can be helped simply by having a conversation with a team-mate, a coach or a trusted friend. “It’s just about taking care of one another,” she says.

“Not everyone is a psychologist, but we are all people. So we should all try and understand how to deal with someone else. There is no handbook, but there should be. So that we know, if someone is struggling, how can we check in with that person? What is the next step? How can we help them find the right person within the club? And mostly how can we keep supporting that person who’s going through it?

“Our generation right now, we have got the responsibility to keep saying, ‘It’s OK to not be OK’ and it is OK to try and find help. It’s OK to take 10 days off if you need it because, in the end, if we keep doing it, we clear that pathway for the younger generation coming through. And that’s not just within football — that’s within society.”

If you would like to talk to someone, please try Samaritans in the UK or US. You can call 116 123 free from any phone

#🥹#beth mead #vivianne miedema

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