'Therapy was a light-bulb, life-changing moment'

Cedwyn Scott started his professional career in Scotland with Dundee

Cedwyn Scott says the break his former club Notts County allowed him to take from football to deal with mental health struggles was "life changing".

The forward, who has since re-joined Carlisle United for a second spell, says he was grappling with loneliness and isolation before he sought help in October.

"I spent a lot of time on my own, and it was similar to what a lot of people maybe experienced during [the Covid-19] lockdowns, which I didn't get because I was at home with a lot of close-knit family at that time," he told BBC Radio Nottingham.

"I experienced real loneliness and I found it difficult."

The gradual break-up of the Magpies side Scott helped to win promotion from the National League in 2023, and the departure of players he was "very close with", contributed to those feelings.

There were also personal circumstances which meant the 26-year-old returned to Nottingham after the summer close-season break without his then partner.

"As a footballer you don't work the typical nine-to-five and you are not busy all hours of the day, so I found myself in my own company a lot," he said.

"Then I started to feel pretty down and just a bit emotional and didn't understand why."

And those emotions followed him on to the pitch.

"I was finding it difficult to train," Scott said.

"I was still training and I wasn't really portraying it in terms of attitude, but I was finding it difficult to train well if that make sense. A lot of the things I was trying weren't coming off and I think that comes from the mental side of the game.

"When you see a striker who is confident, you see them scoring goals and everything they hit goes in. It felt the complete opposite of that, where nothing was going for me."

Only a season earlier, Scott missed eight months of the 2023-24 campaign because of a knee injury.

When he was given time off in October, he had not scored a goal for 18 months.

For someone who had netted 15 goals in Notts' promotion-winning campaign - and been the one to send them back to the EFL with his National League promotion final-winning spot-kick in their penalty shootout against Chesterfield at Wembley - it was a a major comedown.

"Everything was against me in a way, and I found it really difficult so I just thought I needed to take myself out of the environment, try to take a break and have a little re-set," Scott said.

"Talking about it in therapy helped. It helped massively and changed my life to be honest.

"I had a light-bulb, life-changing moment during that and when I went back down [to train with Notts] I felt in a much better place to get going again."

After seeking help and getting support from Notts and the Professional Football Association, Scott was back on the pitch within a month.

He marked his return with a goal against Leicester City's Under-21 side in the EFL Trophy in November.

Scott went on to score against Peterborough United in the FA Cup later the same month, but that was his last goal for the Magpies before he left to return to fellow League Two side Carlisle in January.

He had spent six months in Cumbria in 2021 when he was trying to rebuild his career, having dropped down to play in England's 10th tier as recently as 2019 after featuring for Dundee in the Scottish Premiership just a year earlier.

The spell he had at Gateshead after his time at Carlisle earned him the move to Notts, and his return to Brunton Park earlier this year also saw him reunited with his former Heed boss Mike Williamson.

"It was really tough because obviously what had happened off the pitch played a big part," Northumberland native Scott said of his Notts departure. "I wanted to be back closer to home and closer to family.

"But I wouldn't have made that move if it didn't make sense from a footballing point of view. To move back and play under that manager and his assistant again, it was something I loved doing at Gateshead and I knew they could get the best out of me."

In his second appearance and just 19 minutes into his first start for Carlisle, he scored his long-awaited first English Football League goal to set them up for victory against Fleetwood.

It was the last win of Williamson's reign, with the boss sacked in February and replaced by Mark Hughes in their battle to avoid relegation.

And while Scott is focused on helping Carlisle fight their way up the league table, he says talking about challenges he has faced off the pitch is something he is determined to keep doing.

"The more people share their experiences - I've heard Kieron Dyer and Michail Antonio talk about it - it has really opened my eyes about it," Scott said.

"The more people share their own experiences then it resonates with more people. Spreading awareness normalises it more for people."