Clarke Carlisle: Why I went back to the place where I tried to kill myself 

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The physical damage to Clarke Carlisle, you can see. The scars to his head and face. The injuries to his arms. He says he is suffering from something he calls ‘road burn’ after stepping in front of a lorry in an attempt to take his own life three months ago. Every so often his body slowly ejects another tiny shard of glass from his skin, from the lorry’s shattered windscreen. ‘The doctors tell me it will keep happening for another couple of years,’ he says.

Beneath his neatly tailored suit there are other injuries we can also understand. There was a laceration to his left knee that was so deep it continues to give him trouble. ‘I had a complete reconstruction on the other one when I was playing football but this takes knee pain to a whole new level,’ he says.

And then there is the internal organ damage; in particular to his bladder. ‘I’m having a problem with control,’ he says. ‘I get about a five-second warning before I need to go. It’s a hassle but with pelvic-floor exercises it is getting better.’

Clarke Carlisle spoke to Sportsmail's Chief Sports Reporter Matt Lawton about his battle against depression

Carlisle is on the road to recovery after trying to commit suicide after a collision with a lorry last December

Nick Clegg tweeted this picture after meeting Carlisle at The Oval on Wednesday morning

Not that Carlisle is complaining. He knows how lucky he is; not just to be alive but to still be able to walk. ‘My skeletal frame, my structure if you like, is fine,’ he says. ‘It’s a miracle really.’

Carlisle’s body will heal. But the mental illness that led to him trying to take his own life in the first place, led him to believe that his wife and three children were better off without him, is one he will have to combat for the rest of his life.

It’s why he is sitting opposite me in a restaurant in a London hotel, talking not just about his own experiences but the need to raise awareness of a problem that can affect one in every four of us. Wednesday morning, at The Oval in London, Carlisle joined Nick Clegg in launching the Mental Health Charter for Sport and Recreation. The Deputy Primie Minister later tweeted a picture of the pair with the message: 'Great to meet Clarke Carlisle, @MindCharity ambassador, at today's mental health charter launch. #SportMinds'

Carlisle says: ‘I’m supporting this charter because sport and music are the two best mediums for reaching the mass population and I hope this has an effect on bringing the reality of mental health to the masses.

‘Nobody is immune to mental health issues and it needs to be acknowledged as an illness that needs to be diagnosed and treated.’

Carlisle has been diagnosed and he is being treated, and he spends the next hour or so reflecting not only on that but on the circumstances that concluded with him stepping into the path of a moving truck on the A64 near York on December 22.

The 35-year-old stepped into the path of a moving truck on the A64 near York on December 22

Carlisle's scars to his head and face, as well as his arms, are clearly visible following his suicide attempt

An intelligent, impressively articulate 35-year-old former professional footballer and PFA chairman, he speaks with startling honesty.

He makes no secret of the fact that he has just spent the morning in court, where he had pleaded guilty to another drink-driving offence and failing to provide a sample two days before the incident with the lorry. His sentencing hearing is on May 14. He also tells me of the impact everything has had on his marriage to Gemma. He has been forced to move out of the family home, albeit to a property just 300 yards away. ‘I have to appreciate it’s also been the most traumatic period of my wife’s life as well,’ he says. ‘So we’ve both got a lot of stuff to work on, psychologically and emotionally. And we believe time apart may help that.’

He still wears his wedding ring. ‘Because I’m still married,’ he says.

As confident and as engaging as he is, you notice a slight rattle in his voice and a subtle tremor in his hands. He says the drugs he now takes daily have suppressed his appetite, so much so that he has lost a significant amount of weight.

But he is feeling an awful lot more positive about his life, talking enthusiastically about the foundation he now wants to establish in his name.

He says he has to thank the incredible staff at the Cygnet Hospital in Harrogate for that. ‘I went into the psychiatric hospital on Christmas night and I was in there for about six weeks,’ he says. ‘It was life-changing. To begin with I was on quite severe medication. For almost two weeks I still didn’t want to be alive.

The former defender thanked the staff at Cygnet Hospital in Harrogate for helping him turn his life around

Clarke admits that he and his wife Gemma are living apart as they try to come to terms with everything

‘But it’s amazing, the amount of progress you can make when you work intensely like that. I actively started to engage with the other patients, with the staff.’

They would play Scrabble together or watch movies.

‘One night we watched One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest,’ he says, laughing. ‘We were watching it thinking, “This is us”. We were assigning each other characters. We even labelled one of the nurses Nurse Ratched. She wasn’t entirely happy about that.’

Carlisle talks about ‘Gail, a wonderful woman’ who ran the group therapy sessions. ‘The hospital gave us a safe zone to really be brutally honest about where we had been, how we had got there,’ he says.

‘For three months I had been planning the perfect suicide, and everyone in the room was nodding and saying, “I know exactly what you mean”. It was a place you could really unload; you could dig deep.’

He says he has now been given ‘a set of tools’ to deal more effectively with the severe depression that has been at the root of his problems.

Carlisle (centre) enjoyed a five-year spell at Burnley during his 16-year playing career

Carlisle was man of the match as Burnley beat Sheffield United 1-0 in the 2009/10 Championship play-off final

The defender (right) played for the Clarets the following campaign - their first in the top flight in 33 years

Carlisle's last match came in Northampton's League Two play-off final defeat against Bradford in May 2013

‘They gave me new ways to look at things and new tools to use should I get into the situations that would lead me down a certain path before,’ he says.

‘I step out of there with a completely new set of tools. From that point it’s then up to me whether I use them.

‘I’ve come out knowing what I’ve done before is not good for me. And I feel very guilty and ashamed about the way I thought and acted previously. So I need to establish new boundaries in my relationships. And that is tough. It’s tough when you’ve been married to someone for eight years. It’s tough when you’ve been a son for 35 years, and a brother for 35 years.

‘I need to maintain my wellness. Because if I don’t, anything else I do is going to turn to rubbish. It seems a little bit selfish but I have to focus on myself first. But it’s also altruistic because if I don’t focus on myself first I can’t be a dad, I can’t be a charity trustee or a chairman of this, because it will all go to pot.’

Carlisle accepts not everyone will be prepared to listen. I mention Ralf Little, the actor and his former housemate who was less than sympathetic when he read the interview he gave when he was first released from hospital.

Carlisle admitted in his book to once disappearing on a two-day drinking bender with Little’s bank card. The actor took to Twitter to say that Carlisle was not telling the full story and that he had already been given too many second chances.

Ralf Little (right) has not forgiven his former friend after he once disappeared for two days with his bank card

Carlisle responded to Little on Twitter, reiterating an apology he claims to have already made for his behaviour and insisting he had changed. ‘It’s not for me to have a take on his take on me,’ Carlisle tells me. ‘But it was a bit like court today; there are consequences to my actions.

‘I’ve hurt people. If that’s how Ralf feels, I understand. I hold no resentment towards him. I have apologised in the past, a few times. All I can do is take responsibility for my actions.

‘I mentioned things I’ve done in the past in my book. Things that were part of my manic life. That was how I lived my life. It was erratic.

‘I’m not trying to absolve myself of responsibility here. But what I have to do is self-help. I have to make sure I take my meds every day. I have to take these meds to stop myself going into some acute depression.’

He says there is a crucial difference between the care he is getting now and the treatment he received when he contemplated suicide in the past. ‘This is why I’m trying to set up the Clarke Carlisle Foundation for dual diagnosis,’ he says.

‘That is me. I have a recurrent complex depressive disorder with maladaptive coping mechanisms, which are my addictions. Drinking and gambling, they are my two vices. For me, when stress is one to five in my life it’s fine — no problem — but when it gets from five to 10 the depression kicks in and that’s when I start to drink and gamble.

‘A large proportion of addicts have mental health issues too, and this is where the system isn’t quite set up properly; for dual diagnosis. Because if you go in there with an addiction and depression, the mental health people will tell you to go away and sort out your addiction and the addiction people will tell you to go away and sort out your depression. So it might be that neither is dealt with properly.’

An articulate individual, Carlisle appeared as a contestant on the Channel 4 game show Countdown in 2010

The 35-year-old is now trying to set up the 'Clarke Carlisle Foundation for dual diagnosis' to help others

He went to a casino after being told he had lost his job as a television pundit. It was at the casino in London that he then had a drink, and from there that he got in his car and tried to drive to Southampton for a game he was covering for a radio station. Two days later he would find himself in Leeds Royal Infirmary with those life-threatening injuries. Had the gambling been so bad as to jeopardise his family’s financial future? ‘No,’ he says. ‘It’s not a case of me having blown millions of pounds with scary men chasing me. We’re OK.’

It is almost three months to the day since he stepped in front of that lorry. ‘Do I remember much more of it?’ he says.

‘If anything it’s probably fading. I was having quite vivid flashbacks, especially the moment I stepped over the barrier and into the road. Because once I stepped over the barrier on to the grass bit, and then put my next foot on the road, it was almost as if that was the point of no return. And everything went super slow. I’m not talking about slow motion. I’m talking about every sinew.

‘One of the reasons why I can let it fade is because I’ve been blessed in the way I’ve been able to recover physically. I see it as a point that has changed my entire life. Another reason is because as soon as I came out of hospital I went back to the scene of the incident. I went back to the bridge and I stepped over the barrier, with Colin (Bland), the chief executive of the Sporting Chance clinic. It took all the power out of it. It’s just a stretch of road like any other. There’s no power in that place.’

Bland is also supporting Carlisle in the help he is receiving from Gamblers Anonymous.

Carlisle says he has tried to make contact with the driver of the lorry through the police. ‘He has refused to see me and I completely respect that,’ says Carlisle. ‘He is going to be traumatised massively and he needs to do what he needs to do.’

Carlisle is also receiving support from Gamblers Anonymous as he tries to tackle his demons

But he is glad to be alive? ‘That’s an understatement,’ he says. ‘I thank God every morning, in my morning prayers.’

And he wants to see his kids grow up? ‘It makes me so angry to know that there is an illness that can stop you from seeing that,’ he says.

‘I know I’ve got three lovely kids who are worth living for, but what you don’t understand is that at the time of suicide and pre-suicide you have rationalised that it is the right thing to do.

‘My kids have been fantastic. My eldest (16-year-old Francesca) is an absolute dream. Obviously the incident was a shock to her but she knew about my depression. She’s an amazing young woman.

‘The younger ones are a little bit more oblivious but I’ve tried to explain it to them. I likened it to having an illness you can’t see, like a stomach ache. Only dad’s poorly with an illness in his head, which can make you do silly things and sometimes dangerous things.

‘And they’ve accepted it in the way that I hope the rest of society can. That it’s another illness that needs to be acknowledged, diagnosed and treated.’

Carlisle has the date of births of all three of his children tattooed on to his left forearm 

For more information on the Mental Health Charter for Sport and Recreation, please go to: www.sportandrecreation.org.uk/ mental-health-charter.