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As Indianapolis Colts offensive tackle Braden Smith missed the final five games of the 2025 season, the NFL team would not elaborate on what had sidelined the former Auburn All-American. As recently as last month at the NFL Scouting Combine, Colts general manager Chris Ballard declined to divulge why Smith’s seventh NFL season had ended early.
On Tuesday, Smith revealed the reason himself, as he and his wife, former Auburn softball catcher Courtney Shea Smith, spoke with the Indianapolis Star’s Joel Erickson and revealed the mental-health crisis that disabled the offensive lineman.
READ JOEL A. ERICKSON’S “IN HIS OWN WORDS: COLTS RT BRADEN SMITH’S DESPERATE. LIFE-THREATENING FIGHT VERSUS OCD”
Braden Smith also said he’s ready to play again.
“I wasn’t here last year,” Smith said. “I was physically here, but I wasn’t. I want to be me again here, and I want the people around me to experience that, because I do feel like I do have something to offer the people around me.”
Smith’s problem began in March 2024. Eventually, Smith was diagnosed with the obsessive-compulsive disorder subtype religious scrupulosity.
“There’s the actual, real, true, living God,” Smith said. “And then there’s my OCD god, and the OCD god is this condemning (deity). It’s like every wrong move you make, it’s like smacking the ruler against his hand: ‘Another bad move like that and you’re out of here.‘”
The International OCD Foundation defines scrupulosity as an obsessive-compulsive disorder involving religious or moral obsessions in which the individual is “overly concerned that something they thought or did might be a sin or other violation of religious or moral doctrine. They may worry about what their thoughts or behavior mean about who they are as a person. … Unlike typical religious practice, scrupulous behavior usually exceeds or disregards religious law and may focus excessively on one area of religious practice while other, more important areas may be completely ignored.”
“I was physically present, but I was nowhere to be found,” Smith said. “I did not care about playing football. I didn’t care about hanging out with my family, with my wife, with my newborn son. … I was a month away from putting a bullet through my brain.”
Even so, Smith played all but one of Indianapolis’ 732 offensive snaps in the first 12 games of the 2024 season at right tackle. But he did not play after a 24-6 loss to the Detroit Lions on Nov. 24. The next week, Smith did not practice, and the Colts’ participation report listed “not injury related – personal matter” as the reason.
After the Colts’ 25-24 victory over the New England Patriots on Dec. 1, Indianapolis placed Smith on reserve/non-football illness, and he remained there for the rest of the season.
Smith had begun seeing a psychologist and been diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder. But even with therapy and medication, Smith’s crisis deepened, causing him to enter a mental-health facility in December. A planned four-week stay ended up lasting 48 days, Erickson reported.
While Smith was diagnosed with religious scrupulosity at the facility, he didn’t leave markedly better than when he arrived.
That led Smith into reaching for a “last-ditch” solution – ibogaine. A plant-derived psychoactive compound that is illegal to use in the United States, ibogaine has shown promise in recent studies in the treatment of traumatic brain injuries for veterans.
Smith went to Mexico in late January for a five-day treatment.
“It legitimately resets your brain,” Smith said. “Imagine your brain as a ski slope, and you create all these grooves, from all these trails that you’re going on, and they keep getting deeper and deeper and deeper. Those are the habits that we create, and over time, like, it’s not going to be possible to create a new trail because that one is so deep. Ibogaine literally will clear off those, like, the receptors in your brain.”
The treatment rid Smith of the “OCD god,” and while he’s undertaken continuing OCD-specific therapy, Courtney Smith said her husband “is exactly who he’s meant to be, and who he’s always wanted to be.”
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Mark Inabinett is a sports reporter for Alabama Media Group. Follow him on X at @AMarkG1.
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