Former Athlete Shares How Years-Long Addiction Struggle Inspired His Mental Health Advocacy (Exclusive)

JB Copeland, a 31-year-old athlete-turned-content creator, spoke to PEOPLE in honor of Mental Health Awareness Month

NEED TO KNOW

• JB Copeland shares how concussions ended his football career and led to struggles with addiction and mental health
• He sought help in 2022, spending 60 days in rehab, which he says transformed his life and perspective
• Copeland now uses his platform to advocate for mental health and encourage men to express their emotions

In honor of May's Mental Health Awareness Month, athlete-turned-content creator JB Copeland is opening up to PEOPLE about overcoming a 10-year-old struggle with addiction and mental health.

Copeland — a 31-year-old from Dallas, Texas — spent the majority of his life committed to football. He worked his way up through high school and landed a scholarship playing at the University of North Carolina. But in 2016, during his junior year, back-to-back concussions forced him to retire from the sport he loved.

“I just felt like a shell of a human,” he says. “My whole identity was wrapped up in football so when that ended, it just felt like, what do I do now?”

“I had issues with not feeling good enough for myself and for my coaches and teammates. And it felt like I was a bit worthless now that I could not give my talents or my performance,” he continues. “I just felt out of place and I felt really sad. A mix of a lot of emotions that I wasn't sure how to deal with, which is kind of what took me downhill.”

When his football career ended, Copeland — who had already been drinking alcohol and smoking marijuana since high school — amped up his substance use and even started abusing other drugs.

He was prescribed Xanax for anxiety after his concussions. However, while trying to “mask and suppress my emotions,” he started taking more and more. He also found himself turning to his teammates who had surgery and asking for their prescription medications, which ultimately led to an addiction.

“It was kind of a thing we were all doing, but for me, there was a deeper thing in me that was like, ‘I need this to feel okay.' And it just got worse and worse,” he says.

Copeland says he had a strong support system during that time, but he was so good at hiding his struggles that no one knew.

“Obviously my parents loved me and they tried. You know, my coaches would ask me, ‘Are you okay? Do you need help?' And I would deflect. I wasn't honest,” he recalls. “I didn't know how to get help or what that looked like. I was used to just saying a prayer and hoping that this thing would be taken from me. There is power in prayer, but at the end of the day, there also is more power when it comes to addiction and actually getting therapy and taking care of it.”

Feeling “lost” without football and struggling mentally and physically, Copeland ultimately failed out of college during his senior year and continued spiraling downward in the years following.

Things changed in April 2022. His addiction to alcohol, marijuana and pills got so bad that he lost a lot of weight and started having severe panic attacks. He landed in the ER, and then, could no longer hide his struggles from his wife Chloe, whom he married in 2019.

“I finally just was like, ‘I think that I'm at a breaking point. Obviously what I've been doing isn't working anymore.' So I had a conversation with my wife and I made the decision to check into an addiction rehab facility in a small country town outside of Dallas.”

“I was very scared to make the decision,” he says. “I didn't feel comfortable making it, but I knew that something had to change.”

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Copeland spent 60 days at the rehabilitation center, calling the first three weeks the hardest weeks of his life. “All this pain that I'd suppressed for years, I didn't even know how to begin to sort and file these feelings away and try and make sense of them,” he explains.

“What's communicated to younger men is that feelings aren't a thing that we're gonna talk about. It's not a cool thing to talk about. To cry is to be weak, to feel is to be weak. Put your chest out, put your shoulders back. We don't go there,” he says. “So for me, going through that rehab process showed me that that's actually where freedom lives, it's being able to hold space for myself.”

And it ended up being a life-changing experience for Copeland.

“I remember during one of the group therapy sessions, someone made a funny joke and I belly laughed. And this thought came to me like, ‘When was the last time you laughed?' It had been years since I had actually let out an authentic, genuine laugh. And that laugh was a moment that shifted everything for me,” he recalls. “It's like this emotion and this inner child came back and it was almost like some type of miracle or spiritual awakening. A laugh is what changed my direction and changed my life.”

Through his rehab journey, Copeland was able to get sober and feel connected to himself again. And after returning home, he continued therapy and other tools he learned in the program to start a “new lease on life.”

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He admits he's had setbacks over the years. “I got out of rehab almost four years ago and I've had a ton of ups and downs and not everything is rainbows and sunshine,” he says.

But he says he's proud of being honest with himself and loved ones in the face of those challenges.

“I relapsed about a year and a half out of rehab but I quickly told my wife and said, ‘I'm just not well at the moment. I messed up again.' And over the past couple of years, I've learned to say, ‘Okay, we're not going back to where we were.' I still have hard days but I have to be anchored in knowing where I wanna go and that things are gonna be okay.”

Copeland says that's one of the reasons why he's dedicated his social media platform to being a mental health advocate. He hopes that sharing his story will encourage more boys and men to discuss mental health topics and break the stigma attached to expressing their emotions.

“I didn't want my pain and the things that I had gone through to just be for me. I wanted to help people. I wanted to show people that there's hope,” he tells PEOPLE. “I just wanted to be a voice of encouragement and comfort for people and let people know that they're not alone.”

If you or someone you know is struggling with substance abuse, please contact the SAMHSA helpline at 1-800-662-HELP.

If you or someone you know is struggling with mental health challenges, emotional distress, substance use problems, or just needs to talk, call or text 988, or chat at 988lifeline.org 24/7.

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