The British strongman revealed that his diagnosis came during what appeared to be a golden period of his young life. “I was the popular kid,” Hall explained. “I was top dog. Everything going for you. Family, swimming, everything was going right and then, you know, behind the closed doors, everything isn’t.”
At just 13 years old, Hall’s life imploded rapidly. He found drinking and dr**s at an early age, and combined with an undiagnosed case of ADHD, everything spiralled out of control.
“I managed to get expelled from school, got a girl pregnant, had a nan that was diagnosed with cancer and chucked off the swimming squad and all those things sort of happened at once,” he recalled.
Before this collapse, Hall had been a national swimming champion, winning titles at ages 10, 11, 12, and 13. He was picked for the world class potential squad, Britain’s junior Olympic team, and breaking British records. Swimming was his entire identity and future career path.
The accumulation of traumatic events led Hall to seek professional help.
“I ended up seeing a psychiatrist, diagnosed with clinical depression, prescribed Prozacs. So that was my life at 13, 14, just expelled from schoolg,” he said.
Hall admits he hid his struggles well, even from his family.
“I think I hid it quite well,” he explained. “Obviously my parents knew I was going to the doctors and prescribed Prozac and everything. But it’s not exactly, especially back then you couldn’t… Like no one understood depression and anxiety attacks and what ADHD was.”
The stigma surrounding mental health in the early 2000s meant Hall felt unable to open up to his peers.
“If you ever talked about these things with your mates, you were a laughingstock,” he said. “So there’s no such thing as talking and getting your feelings out and that’s how you felt with your family, your brothers, everybody. So it was all sort of self-contained. Just me and my therapist would talk about these things.”
Looking back now, Hall identifies the real problem behind his breakdown.
“In hindsight, things are so obvious. The drinking dr**s wasn’t the problem. Getting expelled from school wasn’t the problem. Getting the girl pregnant wasn’t the problem. My nan having cancer wasn’t the problem. The problem was I stopped swimming,” he explained.
Without that sense of direction and purpose, Hall spiralled. However, at 14, his mother enrolled him at a local gym.
“I started going to the gym and I started just I don’t know. I guess just wanted to be like Arnold Schwarzenegger,” he said. “Very experienced powerlifters, bodybuilders, took me under the wings and just trained me up.”
That gym became Hall’s lifeline, providing the outlet and focus he desperately needed.
“It was definitely an outlet for all the anger I had,” Hall admitted. “But the outlet was definitely… At the time I didn’t realize this, I thought it was just the anger. But looking back it was something I needed, something to focus on, to sort of zone into.”
Hall went from being a depressed, expelled teenager to becoming the first human to deadlift 1,102 lbs (500 kg) is quite impressive.
