The AFL's mental health reckoning

10.318 - 11.641 Billi FitzSimons

Oh, now it makes sense.

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MUSIC

19.37 - 39.657 Zara Seidler

Good morning and welcome to The Daily Oz. It's Thursday the 7th of May. I'm Zara Seidler. I'm Billie Fitzsimons. Last month, AFL player Elijah Hollins experienced a mental health episode while on the field in a game being televised across the country. Days later, the 24-year-old was hospitalised with his club calling for privacy.

39.805 - 47.859 Unknown

This can't be a public event. It's a private challenge. So what we'll treat it as is that privacy and we'll respect it.

47.879 - 64.648 Zara Seidler

Then earlier this week, the AFL fined Carlton $75,000 for its handling of Hollands' episode. In today's podcast, we're going to explain what happened, plus the calls for more mental health support in the AFL. Before we get there, though, here's a quick message from Claude's In Our Partnerships team.

121 - 141.64 Zara Seidler

My partner is and thus by osmosis I am. But it was interesting. I was actually sitting next to my partner while he was watching the game that we're about to talk about and he was commentating in real time to me about what was happening and immediately I got a sense that there was a new story that was going to emerge from this.

141.66 - 148.787 Zara Seidler

But yes, so Elijah plays for Carlton and the game that we're talking about today was Carlton v Collingwood.

148.767 - 160.177 Billi FitzSimons

Okay, so let's talk about what actually happened during that game because you said that you observed something, your partner observed something, and clearly the whole of the AFL world observed something. What happened?

160.738 - 182.6 Zara Seidler

It is kind of hard to describe with words. I do feel like it's one of those things that when you see it you understand, but the word that keeps being, I guess, thrown around is that Elijah Hollins was demonstrating erratic behaviour. By that I mean that his body, looked or appeared to be doing some like involuntary actions.

183.121 - 206.638 Zara Seidler

He was nowhere near the ball, but his hands were flailing as if he were about to catch it. He touched the ball once during that game, the whole game, and that was seen to be quite unusual. And so there were these kind of what appeared to be involuntary bodily actions. The fact that he had performed badly on the field, had not touched the ball.

224.013 - 241.944 Zara Seidler

Well, this is the whole point of the investigation is had they known something was happening, why did they leave this player on? So he was removed in the last quarter. There are obviously four quarters in an AFL game. So it was only in the very last kind of moments that he was taken off the field.

241.984 - 261.006 Zara Seidler

And that's really been a point of contention, which is to say that there were these very clear, I guess, visual signs that something was happening and that he was experiencing some sort of episode. And yet Carlton left him on the field. And was that the right thing to do? And that's what this investigation has really looked into.

260.986 - 267.872 Billi FitzSimons

And there would have been breaks in between those quarters where the coaches or anyone on staff would have been able to talk to him directly.

267.912 - 283.667 Zara Seidler

Yeah, yeah, 100%. You know, obviously we have coaches and there's training staff who interact with the players throughout the game, but the decision was made to keep him on the field. And I do just want to say I think that it is, there are a few things I want to say.

283.867 - 304.847 Zara Seidler

Firstly, I think we can't forget that this is a story about somebody who experienced what appears to be quite a complex mental health episode in in front of the whole country. That is quite a unique thing to go through. And I have felt like as the media that we have a hard role to play here in talking about it, because I think it's easy to