There was a dark period when Dwayne Johnson was in college that the actor remembers as his “first bout of depression.”
Before movie stardom and even professional wrestling, Johnson wanted to play professional football. But while playing for the highly ranked University of Miami’s football program, the “Black Adam” star was sidelined with a serious shoulder injury that required surgery. And with his dream crushed, his mental health suffered.
“[I] didn’t want to go to school, I was ready to leave, I left school, I didn’t take any midterms,” Johnson recalled last week on “The Pivot Podcast.” “At that time … I didn’t know what mental health was, I didn’t know what depression was, I just knew I didn’t want to be there.”
During the hour-long interview with podcast co-hosts and former NFL players Ryan Clark, Fred Taylor and Channing Crowder, the “Jumanji” actor went on to share bits of his mental-health journey and the “three bouts of depression” he has faced in his life.
Another experience with depression was during his divorce from his first wife, Dany Garcia, in 2008. At the time, Johnson said, he still didn’t know what depression was, and he again went through it alone.
When his mental health began to decline again around 2017, Johnson said, he was finally able to identify his experience as depression.
“And luckily at that time, I had some friends I could lean on and say, ‘Hey you know I’m feeling a little wobbly now, got a little struggle happening, I’m seeing a little gray and not the blue,’” Johnson said.
This isn’t the first time the former professional wrestler has been candid about his mental health. In a 2021 interview with Men’s Health, Johnson shared how growing up he was never taught how to communicate his feelings or ask for help.
“Asking for help is not a weakness,” he told the outlet. “As a matter of fact, asking for help is our superpower, and men, especially us, we fall into this trap of being really averse to vulnerability, because we always want to be strong and feel like we can take on the world.”
Johnson’s mother had her own experiences with depression. He told the U.K. Express in 2019 that he had saved his mom from an attempted suicide as she stepped onto a freeway in Nashville. At the time, Johnson was 15.
“I grabbed her and pulled her back on the gravel shoulder of the road,” he said. “We both healed, but we’ve always got to do our best to pay attention when other people are in pain. We have to help them through it and remind them they are not alone.”
Johnson, People’s 2016 Sexiest Man Alive, whose hulking physique has been his calling card throughout his acting career, also turns to the gym as a way to deal with depression. He told Clark and the podcast co-hosts that training “truly is my anchor.”
In a separate interview with Men’s Health, Johnson said in 2022 that while experiencing depression, “[T]he gym became my best friend.”
“You’re able to go to the gym to sweat out toxins and get a little bit more clarity when you walk out the door,” he said. “It doesn’t fix the problem, but it helps.”
On the podcast, Johnson also shared how being a parent, raising his three children — adult daughter Simone Johnson and two young girls, Jasmine and Tiana — has helped his mental health.
“The saving grace for me has really been my daughters, the three of them, and being a girl dad,” Johnson said. “That’s been the saving grace because you look at them and you realize … this is what it’s all about.”