As his last act, he distanced himself from all of his family and friends. Still caring for them, he felt that if he simply pushed everyone away it would be easier for them to accept his suicide than if he had stayed in close contact. Through his college and NFL career he had talked to his mother "every day or at least every other day." Suddenly, as he prepared for his suicide, that all stopped.
"There was a point of time where I didn’t talk to my family for months," he said, shaking his head with regret, "I stopped talking to a lot of friends."
While methodically sabotaging his own life, O’Callaghan was going to physical therapy at the Chiefs facility. He still clung to a small glimmer of hope that he might have one more season in the league. There the team’s head trainer,
David Price, noticed O’Callaghan was not himself, suddenly acting erratically.
Price encouraged O’Callaghan to spend some time with
Susan Wilson, a woman who worked with the Chiefs and the NFL counseling players on drug abuse.
"David saw the pain pills as the problem, and they were," O’Callaghan explained. "But the real problem was why I was abusing them. And it wasn’t just the injuries."
It took Wilson only two visits with her new patient to figure out that the physical pain was not the only issue driving O’Callaghan to pain killers and contemplating suicide. That suicidal talk, Wilson recognized early on, was not just talk. She realized the threat to his safety was not imminent, or she would have checked him into a hospital. But the threat was very real and lingered on the horizon.
Wilson racked her brain to piece together clues. O’Callaghan’s sexual orientation crossed her mind as a possibility.
"Not because of any way he behaved," Wilson explained. "Ryan is one of those people who, if you look at them, would never draw suspicion. But as a practicing psychologist, your mind goes through the list of things that drive people to consider suicide, and that was one of them."
Plus, she had counseled gay NFL players before. The concept was not foreign to her.
Knowing she could not legally reveal to anyone, including the Chiefs, what they were talking about helped O’Callaghan slowly open up to her. Months and countless hours of conversation after their first meeting, Wilson became the first person to whom he confided he was gay.
