Michael Slater & Bipolar Disorder: a Test Career, and What Came After

Michael Slater opened the batting for Australia during the most dominant period in the country's cricket history, scored fourteen Test centuries, and was one of the most watchable players of his era — a batsman who attacked from the first ball and celebrated hundreds by kissing the crest on his helmet.

His Test career ended abruptly in 2001, at thirty-one, in circumstances that were reported at the time as erratic behaviour and later understood in the context of a bipolar disorder diagnosis.

The Cricket

Slater made his Test debut in the 1993 Ashes and scored a century at Lord's in only his second Test. He went on to play 74 Tests, scoring 5,312 runs at an average just over 42, with fourteen centuries.

He was an opener of a particular and now largely extinct kind — a player who treated the new ball as an opportunity rather than a threat, and who scored at a rate that unbalanced bowling attacks before the middle order arrived. He was, alongside Mark Taylor and later Matthew Hayden and Justin Langer, part of an Australian side that lost very rarely.

He was also known for an intensity that occasionally spilled over, and for a habit of getting out in the nineties — nine times in his career, an unusually painful record.

2001 and the Diagnosis

Slater was dropped from the Australian side in 2001. Reporting at the time referred to behaviour on and off the field that had concerned team management, and to personal difficulties including the breakdown of his marriage.

He was subsequently diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and spoke about it publicly in the years that followed. He described periods of elevated mood and behaviour he could not account for afterwards, and depressive episodes, and he was among the first prominent Australian sportspeople to discuss a psychiatric diagnosis openly.

That openness mattered a great deal in the Australian sporting context of the early 2000s, which was — to put it mildly — not a culture that encouraged men to discuss mental illness. Slater talking about it, along with a small number of other athletes in the same period, is part of why that has changed substantially since.

He moved into commentary and had a successful broadcasting career with Channel Nine and later Seven, covering cricket for around two decades.

The Years Since

Slater's life since leaving broadcasting has involved serious and widely reported difficulties, including criminal charges in Australia. We are not going to detail them here, for two reasons.

The first is that this is a website about bipolar disorder, and we have applied a consistent principle throughout it: a psychiatric diagnosis explains mood episodes, it does not explain or excuse harm done to other people. We said this on Mel Gibson's page and it applies equally here. Anyone reading about Slater's diagnosis should not take it as an account of anything else.

The second is that these are recent, ongoing matters involving other people, and a biography page about a cricketer's mental health is not the place to litigate them.

What can be said is that his story is a reminder that a diagnosis and even a public disclosure are not the same as sustained treatment, and that the years after a career ends are frequently the hardest for professional athletes — a well-documented pattern involving loss of structure, identity and income all at once.

Legacy

As a cricketer Slater's record speaks for itself, and his batting is remembered fondly by anyone who watched Australian cricket in the 1990s.

His contribution to this website's subject is his early willingness to name a bipolar diagnosis publicly in a sporting culture that had no vocabulary for it. That took some courage in 2001, and it helped open a door that Australian sport now walks through routinely.

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