A rugby player's secret battle against beast of depression

Duncan Bell would never strike you as the likely victim of depression. A 19-stone tighthead prop, who cultivates his machismo from the very fact that he must grind bone on bone with his opponents every week, appears positively immune to moments of darkness and introspection.

As you walk into his home in the Cotswolds haven of Chipping Sodbury, the living room animated by the chatter of his four children, you would not even suspect that he had been suffering in silence for a decade.

But over the next hour Bell empties the emotional tank. At the time of our meeting, he has not even told his Bath team-mates about his fight against depression or of his decision to retire from rugby aged 37. Despite several years of counselling, courses of antidepressants, and one incident where he cried in front of a fellow player, the subject remains painfully raw. "Can we talk here?" he says, gesturing to the garden table. "I don't want the kids to hear any of this."

Bell cuts a formidable physical presence: 275lb of front-row bulk, battered by 168 matches for Bath and a further five for England. The skin ripped off his knuckle is his latest war wound, and an image at odds with the deep-seated vulnerability he is about to divulge. While Marcus Trescothick and Stan Collymore have become eloquent spokesmen for the pernicious creep of depression in sport, nobody in top-rank rugby has documented the condition as starkly as this.

"I was just going to retire this week - I wasn't going to say anything about the depression," he explains, quietly. "It's very difficult for anybody in the sporting environment, to come out and tell people what you have been going through for the past decade of your life. But I thought this was as good a time as any."

Bell is racked by anxiety about how his revelations will be received in the dressing room. He also reproaches himself, after the epiphany of how long he had harboured feelings of depression, that he did not seek help sooner.

"I know exactly why, though. It's a sign of weakness, especially in such a male-dominated, testosterone-fuelled arena as a rugby team. It's a real admission of failure."

In 2009, the year Bell was selected for England's autumn internationals, his mood shifts were manifesting themselves more overtly. "It wasn't me who highlighted the issue, it was the club doctor. He asked, 'How are you feeling?' 'Fine, why?' He said, 'No, you're not. I think something's up.' Clearly my personality had changed. At that point I just broke down. I couldn't help it."

Bell describes how his character would become polarised, so that he could still join the frat-boy culture off the field without his colleagues ever perceiving his private agonies.

"I'm a fairly positive character around the club. When I'm with the boys, I'm not a different person, but there's plenty of laughing and banter. I know now that it's a complete and utter defence mechanism, against what I know is simmering under the surface. It's an exaggeration of my true self."

He identifies his marriage break-up as the trigger for his torment seven years ago, when one episode proved to him how profoundly he had been affected. On England's 2006 tour to Australia, he had an argument with Pat Sanderson, his captain, and dissolved in tears. "I had been out of line and he was putting me right, like a captain should. I just put it down to being tired, so I brushed it off. But I recognise that I wasn't happy on tour and also, I suppose, in life.

"The older I grew, the lows became lower and the highs never really went much higher. That was just in rugby. Even when I was away from the sport, I would watch a sad film and find myself becoming overly involved with it. I had never experienced anything like it."

At precisely the point that Bell started to see a counsellor following the collapse of his marriage, Bath's doctor urged him to consult a specialist.

"I did feel things were spiralling out of control," he admits, although he has since tried to wean himself off the antidepressant medication. "It deadens you. It takes away a lot of what I consider to be the soul.

"Whereas a normal person would have a spectrum of happiness and sadness, it removes the extremes so that you live in the middle section, in a kind of haze. That's great if you're depressed, because it brings you up, but I found I couldn't reach the other end even when I had the children around. I'd rather feel the intense love for my kids and have depression than be on antidepressants."

For Bell to articulate his ordeal represents an act of courage, not least because of his fear of being diminished in the eyes of others. First, he worries about the response of his family - in particular his father, whom he says tutted in disapproval when he informed him flippantly that he was taking 'happy pills'.

Then, he frets about the prospect of jaws hitting the floor within the Bath team. But he is unwavering in his desire to tell them. "I want the boys to know, because they have been my extended family for 18 years. Whether they know it or not, they have helped me through some of the worst periods of my life."

It seems reasonable to ask whether Bell believes such turmoil has ever coloured his performances on the pitch. "It has never happened during games," he says, firmly. "I'm in my own zone, focused on winning. Training is a little different - I have periods thinking, 'I'm going to break down here'. I've had to control it so as not to show any weakness. I remember, years earlier when I played for Sale, thinking of going to see a local GP. Then I told myself, 'Toughen up'.

"I know someone who's a manic depressive and I used to think, 'Get on with it. Smile. How hard can it be to feel happy?' It's not that simple. It's a deep-rooted issue you can't get rid of. Unless you've experienced it, it's very hard to feel any empathy.

"I used to look forward to training, to be involved with a group ethos. It meant that I didn't have to be on my own. When you're alone, that's when the beast that lies within rears its head and gets to you. That's when my mind runs away with itself."

The same beast, Bell knows, still lurks in his psyche. For that reason, he acknowledges that a future outside rugby "scares the living daylights" out of him. Since he enrolled in Bath's youth ranks at the age of 19, the sport has been all he has known. While he has trained as a mortgage and insurance adviser, to help set up his own business, he is deeply apprehensive about stepping away from the clubhouse camaraderie.

"I'm essentially working for myself, so straight away that's a very insular existence. There's a great transition from being in the rugby family to being on your own. It will be interesting to see how I respond."

He has found intense support from his partner Katie, a dentist working in nearby Cirencester. Contented photos of the couple adorn the living-room wall, yet Bell remains mindful that the path ahead is strewn with uncertainties. "My contract finishes and so does my money," he says of his retirement.

"My divorce wiped out everything, so it will be a case of starting again. Not many players of my age would retire with nothing, but that's pretty much what's happening. I'm looking at this as if I'm a young player who has had a career-ending injury after only a couple of games."

Bell wishes he was taking his leave with more winner's medals on the mantelpiece, save for his Principality Cup victory with Pontypridd in 2002 or his European Challenge Cup triumph with Bath six years later. But he has had his fill of the cycle of negativity he would enter before each match. "The way I get motivated for games is to think that something terrible will happen - that I will drop the ball, get smashed in the scrum. I know it's the wrong way to go about things, but I've done it since I was 10 years old."

Rugby's hidden cases of depression are, Bell argues, widespread. He is plainly troubled by that of Selorm Kuadey, the bright prospect who played 16 times for Sale and died in January, at just 24, in an apparent suicide. "It's scary when you read about it and think, 'That could have been me'. I know for a fact there are guys in the squad experiencing similar situations to mine, and in other squads."

The consolation, as Bell unburdens himself of this anguish, lies in the reaction of the one player who already knows: David Flatman, the Bath loosehead and his best friend at the club. "He said, 'I'm gutted for you'. To come out like this is hard, and I never had any intention of doing it this way. But he also said it would be a really good thing to end your career knowing that you had helped someone."