"It was a tough time for myself leading into the finals. I was really struggling," Franklin said.

He knows now that the best decision he made was to ask for help for he couldn't deal with it alone.

He stepped away from the game. He didn't play finals and focused on getting himself right. The club revealed he had stepped away from football indefinitely to deal with an unspecified mental illness and a mild form of epilepsy that was unrelated to the mental health issues.

"I put my hand up and said I needed help and I'm so glad I did it. I did that, I took some time away and it was the best decision I've made," he said.

"The best thing that I've done is put my hand up to get the help that I needed. And that's the biggest thing for anyone to do, to put your hand up and go, 'yeah I need the help.

"If you are struggling I definitely recommend that you ask for that help, because it will change your life, definitely."

On Monday, Franklin returned to training with the Sydney Swans, importantly observing that he felt healthy once more.

"I'm feeling good," he told the Sydney website.

"It's been a really hard three months for me but I'm feeling happy, healthy and I just got back from a nice holiday overseas. But it's good to be back in Sydney. I'm looking forward to getting into training.

"I've got such a great support network around me, in my partner, my family, my friends and the football club have been terrific through this tough time. The support's been amazing."

Franklin said he had addressed many things in his time away and now understood himself better.

"I'm not the best communicator, I do tend to struggle communicating with people. Over these last couple of months it's been about building those relationships and being able to communicate a little bit better," he said.

"It was about getting myself right, getting my health back in order, and getting back to being happy. Now I'm hungry to get back out there."

Aggravating the problems for Franklin in dealing with his problems and working through his recovery was the high-profile nature of his job and that of his fiancée, model Jesinta Campbell.

Campbell told Fairfax at the weekend that the pubic spotlight made the whole process more difficult to cope with for both of them and had, in her opinion, slowed the recovery process for her partner.

"This is something that has required a lot of privacy and, unfortunately, we haven't really been granted that. I think, looking back on it, yes, it has hindered his recovery and his well-being, and my well-being too, and it's just really sad that we weren't given the respect that was needed for it," Campbell said.

While she accepted that the couple were in the public spotlight because of their high profile roles as an AFL player and for her as a model who was the David Jones ambassador and a former Miss Universe Australia she also felt too free to ignore the fact they are people and deal with them like a commodity.

She said they are still "human beings and you're playing with two people's lives here".

"People have been a little bit nasty too. There have been some people in the media that have just said some really incredibly nasty and hurtful things that are just so left of field and so wrong in this day and age," she said.