Newcastle United's Dan Burn has revealed all on his battles with suicidal thoughts and what he did to stop them from impacting his life

Dan Burn has opened up about how speaking to someone helped him overcome suicidal thoughts. The Newcastle United defender had battles with his mental health during the early stages of his career but has worked through them, preventing such feelings from impacting him now.

Burn faced a number of challenges as a young footballer which included being released by Newcastle and his parents getting divorced. The Englishman ended up earning a big break and signing for Premier League club Fulham in 2011, but that was when his issues began.

Due to spending a lot of time by himself and playing minimal minutes, Burn admits that he got into his own head and even managed to convince himself that he had a brain tumour before later breaking down before a game.

In a new and revealing interview, he told The Times: “I’d played Premier League football, but then we’d been relegated and I wasn’t really getting a kick. I was spending a lot of time by myself because my wife worked, so I would go home to the flat and I would just sit there, and I think it started from there.

"My parents got divorced and I think I didn’t deal with it well. I was trying to be strong for my brother and the family and I probably didn’t really deal with a lot of those feelings, and that was coupled with me not having a great time in football.

"As soon as I was home, I was struggling. I was having suicidal thoughts. I’d managed to convince myself I was dying, that I had a brain tumour. I ended up sending myself to a neurosurgeon in Harley Street, and they said, ‘No, you’re fine,’ and I still didn’t believe them. That was the kind of mind space I was in.

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“Then, one day, I turned up to Fulham for a game and I was just in the car park crying. I couldn’t get out of the car. I was on the phone to my mum saying, ‘I can’t do this any more, I can’t feel like this.’

“And that’s when I spoke to someone at Fulham, and then they got me help. I managed to learn tools of why I was feeling that way, if I ever had those feelings again, how to deal with it, how to look at triggers that were setting us off. I just worked through a lot of things, and now I feel good, I’m in a good space. I don’t let a bad day turn into a bad week and a bad month, which is what I used to do.”

Burn re-joined his boyhood club in 2022 and has since played in the Champions League, scoring in their historic Carabao Cup triumph a few years ago.

Some strong performances for the Magpies also saw him included in Thomas Tuchel's England squad at the World Cup but he has not been named in his latest 25-man group. That is despite iconic cameos against Mexico and Norway in the knockout stages which saw Burn earn cult status.

It has, however, been a challenging start to the season for Burn and his team-mates with Newcastle thirteenth in the Premier League table and the 34-year-old only returning from injury in the last few weeks.