Ronda Rousey has showed her strong support for a new suicide prevention center in Los Angeles.
She gave a speech outside the Didi Hirsch Mental Health Services Suicide Prevention Center on Feb. 7, and then helped pull the wrapping off the facility’s new sign.
As Rousey expressed in her speech, suicide is not a topic foreign to her.
“I lost both my father and my grandfather to suicide. It’s something that runs in my family like cancer runs in others. Suicide is very unique for the stigma that surrounds it,” Rousey said in a video clip, via TMZ.
This isn’t the first time Rousey has spoken about suicide. She made a very personal comment in an interview after her first UFC loss, a devastating knockout by Holly Holm in 2015.
Rousey shared on The Ellen Show that she thought about suicide after the loss, but then she considered her boyfriend, now husband, Travis Browne, and the future that she wanted to have together with him, and the children she wanted to have.
Rousey is also no stranger to Didi Hirsch Mental Health Services. She spoke at the company’s leadership awards in a video posted to the company’s YouTube channel in 2014.
In a video clip from 2016, where she speaks about her post-Holly Holm fight depression, she talks about how she frequently works with the company.
Rousey has spent the past year wrestling in the WWE. However, she could soon pursue another career direction, as WWE head Vince McMahon hinted that Rousey could leave the WWE. He made the comments during a Fourth Quarter 2018 earnings call, Wrestling Inc reported.
During a question and answer session, a caller raised a hypothetical situation about Ronda Rousey leaving the WWE.
“Let’s say Ronda Rousey leaves WWE, does that damage the WWE franchise and does that make the experiment a worthy experiment, to bring people in that have built brands elsewhere, to WWE when they may in fact exit and hurt the WWE brand. I’m curious as to that experiment, and your learnings from this Ronda Rousey experiment,” said the caller.
“Bringing Ronda in gave us more visibility in terms of the initiative of reaching more women,” said McMahon. “And when you do something like that it allows you to not just use Ronda’s platform from a different niche to come into WWE, Ronda in of herself becomes a brand of WWE. It’s a different Ronda than what you saw before, in terms of UFC and things of that nature.”
McMahon continued, giving no clear answer about Rousey’s future, but also didn’t dismiss the idea she could potentially leave.
“She’s one of the brightest people we’ve ever done business with,” said McMahon. “And the fact that she’s adapted to the WWE culture so fast, it really is truly an amazing salute to her as an athlete, and as a human being. So, the Rondas will come in and out, and when they do, as long as we know what those dates are, we plan around it.”
A documentary about Ronda Rousey’s life, called “Through My Father’s Eyes,” is currently in post-production, according to IMDB.
