Emirates Man

How often do you get to sit across from an international sportsman who has felt the eyes of millions watching him, only for him to talk about hitting rock bottom? I went into my conversation with Robin Uthappa not knowing what to expect. Mental health is something we have been hearing about time and again, so I wondered whether there was anything left that had not already been said. But Uthappa had plenty of thoughts, including admitting that there was a point in his life when he could not look at himself in the mirror for an entire year.

Globally we have reached an uncomfortable point in the conversation around mental health, where the very volume of the discourse threatens to hollow it out. Open any social media platform or podcast feed and you will find trauma timelines and burnout confessions packaged into ten-episode arcs with branded merchandise to match. Mental health has become content, and content has a half-life. We have become so accustomed to hearing the words that we no longer feel the weight of them. A desensitisation is taking hold, where vulnerability is now performative and begins to look like just another aesthetic applied over real pain. Then someone like Uthappa opens his mouth and the performance stops.

Uthappa was never supposed to be this kind of storyteller. He was the batsman who was applauded every time he entered the field, the T20 World Cup winner of 2007, a man whose face belonged on billboards. Clinical depression began for him in 2009, followed by a first urge to do himself harm that same year. Then came 2011, which he describes as a year so dark that he stopped looking at his own face entirely. “I was so ashamed of who I had become,” he shares.

Even in the UAE, where Uthappa now lives with his family, a 2022 study published in Middle East Current Psychiatry found that negative attitudes towards mental health correlated with traditional family values, with men showing significantly higher levels of such adherence than women. The study noted that mental health issues remain stigmatised in the UAE, contributing to resistance in seeking professional help. Male expatriates, especially those from South Asian backgrounds, reported higher levels of emotional suppression and were far less likely to access counselling services than their female counterparts.

Uthappa understands this loneliness directly. “It’s very easy to be lonely,” he admits, “and it’s even easier to be tricked into thinking you’re not, because you’re on your phone observing other people, which makes you feel even less.” Men have very few options when it comes to finding a safe space to speak about what they are feeling, partly because they often lack the language to articulate it and partly because the act of speaking feels like a surrender of power. “When you’re vulnerable with someone, you’re actually giving your power away to somebody else,” explains Uthappa. Men have been raised on a diet of hardness: don’t cry, get up, take the punch on your chin. That approach works well enough on a cricket field, but it leaves something missing in the quiet hours of the night.

This is where TRUE, the coaching movement Uthappa launched, enters the picture. TRUE includes programmes designed specifically for men who have never been taught to process emotion. The Amber Bond programme, which Uthappa plans to pilot in late 2026, is a fourto-five-day intensive coaching immersion that helps men address their inner child, unprocessed grief, and the shame attached to feeling at all. It uses NLP techniques and somatic breathing practices to help men change the meaning of experiences that have disempowered them. Uthappa himself underwent similar coaching as a twenty-year old, and he credits it with helping him reframe limiting beliefs. “I remember joking to my wife during lockdown that once I finished playing cricket, maybe we should do this together,” he recalls. “She laughed. But here we are.”

Uthappa waited years before speaking publicly about his mental health struggles, timing his first disclosure after winning the orange cap in the 2014 Indian Premier League when the spotlight was brightest. He knew that if someone like him could admit to severe depression, it might open a door for other men. Since then, he has watched the conversation evolve. The stigma has loosened, but he is under no illusion that it has disappeared. “Boys are born through the divine feminine, and they exist in the divine feminine till they hit puberty,” he says. “But somewhere along the way, we are introduced to masculinity in a very hard masculine way.” The result is a generation of men who can perform under pressure but cannot name what they feel when the pressure lifts. They cannot ask for help because asking has been coded as failure.

The TRUE Freedom Project extends this thinking to adolescents, covering topics that traditional schools ignore, from etiquette and communication to networking and personal finance. “No one teaches us what colours go well with our skin tone, how to dress for confidence, how to speak under duress, how to network without performing,” he explains. He is also working on an emotionally sentient AI called Nova OS, designed for men who cannot bring themselves to speak to another human being. “A lot of people are talking to ChatGPT right now,” he says, “but there’s no emotional sentience to it. What we’re trying to build listens from different perspectives and responds with empathy.”

For Uthappa, the turning point came in 2011 when he was close to ending his life and heard a voice in his head say stop, not now. That “not now” made him curious enough to pick up a pen and start writing about himself. He realised that everything he had written were his worldly achievements, which left him with an uncomfortable question; “Who am I beyond that?” That question became the first thread of TRUE. Answering it took him two years of setting values based on his own morality, becoming the kind of husband, father, and friend he wanted to be. “I wanted to be able to look in the mirror and say that I love this guy and have immense respect for him,” he shares.

Uthappa has stood in roaring stadiums and held trophies above his head, yet he admits he once could not stand his own reflection. He spent years hiding how he really felt and pretending everything was fine, and he only started to recover when he got curious about who he might be beyond his achievements. When one man stops pretending and starts being honest, others who hear his story might wonder whether they can do the same.

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Images: Supplied