I spent more than 15 years rising to become a C-level executive in professional sports. Then I crashed. I spent two and a half years largely in bed, unable to string a coherent sentence together. I couldn’t watch television or listen to a podcast. My brain was offline. I felt gone from the world. I was diagnosed, then diagnosed again, and again, over and over and over, and prescribed 52 different combinations of psychotropic drugs. These weren’t back-alley practitioners. They were doctors with “top doctor” plaques on their walls, from the country’s most prestigious institutions. I was told this was the “gold standard” of care.

When I finally climbed out of my abyss, I started noticing patterns the headlines weren’t connecting.

In spring 2022, college athletes were dying one after another. Katie Meyer at Stanford. Robert Martin at Binghamton. Sarah Shulze at Wisconsin. Lauren Bernett at James Madison. That April, I posted their names and photos side by side on Instagram, and the post went viral. It spread because no major outlet had put those names, or that trend, together. By May, at least six college athletes had died by suicide in three months.

Now it’s happening in the NFL. For more than a decade, no active player had died by suicide. In the past year, two have: Marshawn Kneeland of the Dallas Cowboys, at 24, and Rondale Moore of the Minnesota Vikings, at 25. Add former players Rudi Johnson, Jordan Devey and Alphonso Smith, and five members of the NFL family have died by suicide in a single year. Last October, former All-Pro running back Doug Martin died in police custody during a mental health crisis. Each death was treated as its own tragedy, and then the media and fans moved on.

Athletes and celebrities aren’t the story. They’re just the part we can see. More than 200,000 Americans died from drug overdoses, alcohol and suicide in each of 2021, 2022 and 2023. That’s roughly double the rate of two decades earlier. Yet you almost never see those three numbers on one chart. Federal data arrives late, in separate silos, and the media rarely puts the pieces together. So a crisis this size stays invisible, one headline at a time.

Here’s what I believe: We’re putting square pegs in round holes. Our mental health system is built on three pillars: give the person a label, prescribe medication for the label, and add talk therapy. It’s the model behind most workplace employee assistance programs. For many people, that’s where care begins and ends. We’ve pathologized ordinary human reactions to extraordinary life events. Grief, burnout, heartbreak and sadness now get relabeled as disorders to be managed rather than experiences to be navigated.

The conversation we aren’t having is about the body. Through the #SameHere Psych Alliance, I’ve spent years learning from the world’s leading trauma clinicians and researchers. They are clear that challenging life events change us physically, affecting our nervous systems, sleep and stress hormones. Healing usually takes both top-down work, like cognitive restructuring, and bottom-up work, like somatic and body-based practices. Most people in crisis are offered a narrow slice of the cognitive therapies and almost none of the somatic ones.

Now look at this weekend. Authorities say Eckhart had been involuntarily held for psychiatric evaluation six times in 18 months and had just left a seven-week inpatient stay. She did exactly what we tell people to do. She asked for help, again and again. And last December, Gerber described his own treatment publicly on Instagram: seven medications at once, including two benzodiazepines, an opioid-based medication, an antidepressant, a blood pressure drug repurposed for nightmares, ketamine infusions and a nerve pain medication. I’m not drawing conclusions about how either of them died. I’m pointing at what care looked like while they were still alive. One was cycled through crisis stabilization. The other was handed a stew of drugs, with no way to tell which was doing what.

To be clear, this is not an argument against medication. Medication can help many people, and no one should stop a prescription without medical guidance. My argument is against a system that leads with a label and a prescription pad and too often stops there.

So here’s my challenge to the media: Stop treating deaths of despair as one-offs. Cover them as a beat with a trend line, and ask what care each person received and whether it was working.

And for everyone else:

Change the question.

Ask “What happened to you?” instead of “What’s wrong with you?”

Ask for the whole toolbox.

Ask your provider about approaches that work with the body, various forms of cognitive restructuring exercises, and for homework you practice, rep by rep, between sessions.

Check on your strong people.

The athletes, executives and “fine” friends are often hurting quietly. I know. I was one of them.

We can keep writing obituaries one at a time, or we can finally read them together.

Eric M. Kussin is the founder of #SameHere, The Global Mental Health Movement, and the author of “Diagnosis: How We Defeat the Mental Health Epidemic by Labeling Less and Connecting More,” out Nov. 10 from Amplify Publishing Group. If you or someone you know is struggling, call or text 988.