Andrew Wiltse was one of the most promising competitors to emerge in recent years but his professional grappling career has taken a backseat for a little while as he’s needed some time to deal with mental health struggles. Wiltse won the IBJJF no gi world championship at every coloured belt level on his journey through the ranks and burst onto the highest levels of the sport when he was promoted to black belt at the end of 2020. He became incredibly popular not just for his exciting competition style and success on the mats, but also for how open and honest he was publicly about a wide range of things. Now he’s continued that and opened about the issues that have kept him out of high-level competition since 2021:
“This past year has actually been one of the roughest years that I’ve had in my entire life. A lot of people missed out on the fact that I had this really public manic episode that happened, like 7, 8, 9 months ago, something like that. But it was actually a huge deal. I’ve never had my brain shattered in that way before. It just kind of tore me into pieces and I’ve been rebuilding since that point in time.”
“My manic episode was actually medication induced. I think without that I’ve been able to manage my bi-polar pretty well, I mostly just deal with depressive episodes. The manic episodes were not that big of a deal until that one in particular.”
“The problem was, with manic episodes that are super bad, as high as you go is as low as you’re gonna go. And I went super high. I actually didn’t sleep for about a week. Genuinely, I did not sleep… I deteriorated rapidly. It turns out that you really do need to sleep. I hit such a high point in that manic episode that the depression after was crippling.”
Remarkably, Andrew Wiltse is on the road back to competition after taking the time to address his mental health struggles and is already planning his return:
“Now I’m starting to come back, now I’m feeling good. I’m getting in good shape and I’m starting to feel like I’m competition-ready, almost, and I’m getting ready to take a Who’s Number One (match) or something soon. But the last year has been horrid. 2022 was just not my year.”
There’s no news yet on where or when exactly Andrew Wiltse will be returning, but he explained that he is still dealing with the same mental health struggles at the moment. Regardless, he is also back to training hard with the rest of his teammates at Pedigo Submission Fighting as often as he can:
“I’m training every night at Daisy Fresh. I’ve missed a couple nights here and there, because I still don’t feel like I’m back at 100 percent mentally. It’s a little harder for me to jump into the swing of things this time than it has in the past after coming back from a mental health episode, but I still just attribute that to how bad the mental health episode was.”
