Mental Health in Elite Sport

Applied Perspectives from Across the Globe

Carsten Larsen, Karin Moesch, Natalie Durand-Bush, Kristoffer Henriksen, Carsten Larsen, Karin Moesch, Natalie Durand-Bush, Kristoffer Henriksen, Carsten Hvid Larsen, Carsten Hvid Larsen, Karin Moesch, Natalie Durand-Bush, Kristoffer Henriksen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367427672
• eBook ISBN: 9781000390957
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Applied Psychology

Mental Health in Elite Sport: Applied Perspectives from Across the Globe provides a focused, exhaustive overview of up-to-date mental health research, models, and approaches in elite sport to provide researchers, practitioners, coaches, and students with contemporary knowledge and strategies to address mental health in elite sport across a variety of contexts.

Mental Health in Elite Sport is divided into two main parts. The first part focuses globally on mental health service provision structures and cases specific to different world regions and countries. The second part focuses on specific mental health interventions across countries but also illustrates specific case studies and interventions as influenced by the local context and culture. This tour around the world offers readers an understanding of the massive global differences in mental health service provision within different situations and organizations. This is the first book of its kind in which highly experienced scholars and practitioners openly share their programs, methods, reflections, and failures on working with mental health in different contexts.

By using a global, multi-contextual analysis to address mental health in elite sport, this book is an essential text for practitioners such as researchers, coaches, athletes, as well as instructors and students across the sport science and mental health fields.

1

Setting the scene

Mental health in elite sport

Carsten Hvid Larsen, Andreas Küttel, Karin Moesch, Natalie Durand-Bush, and Kristoffer Henriksen

Elite sport, and sports in general, offer many opportunities to promote mental health (MH). The positive effects of regular exercise on MH and well-being are well established for both youth and adults (Biddle, 2016). Moreover, the sporting context can be an excellent psychosocial-emotional training ground where players engage in teamwork and social interactions, and acquire psychological and emotional skills such as self-awareness, discipline, resilience, motivation, communication, planning, and time management, to name a few (Aquilina, 2013).

Despite the potential positive influence of sport, we have seen in recent years several examples of elite athletes experiencing MH problems, which corresponds with research findings demonstrating significant levels of mental ill-health among some athlete populations (e.g., Foskett & Longstaff, 2018; Gouttebarge, Castadelli-Maia, Gorczynski, Hainline, Hitchcock, Kerkhoffs, Rice, & Reardon, 2019). How can we best understand this? Is a downside to the intense involvement in organized sport needed for athletes to be successful? Increasingly, competitive international sport has led to intensified pressure on Olympic and professional athletes. We are witnessing increasing training loads and performance demands that inevitably present threats to athletes’ MH. Just as physical training must be balanced with adequate recovery to see progress, psychological demands must also be balanced with recovery and mental performance and MH support. But which strategies are most suitable for MH promotion and prevention, and how can they be organized and implemented? What course of action should be taken when MH challenges become illnesses and what factors must be taken into consideration for the treatment of mental disorders in elite sport contexts? These are some of the key questions that motivated this book.

A comprehensive lens to address mental health

There has long existed the assumption that because elite athletes are in peak physical health, they are impervious to MH challenges (Morgan, 1979). But with emerging evidence regarding the prevalence of mental illness in athletes and the increasing number of high-profile athletes publicly talking about their mental challenges and disorders, this assumption is merely but a myth. The elite sport context consists of a unique range of stressors that may negatively influence athletes’ MH (Arnold & Fletcher, 2012; Schinke et al., 2017), for example overtraining (Kenttä, Hassmen, & Raglin, 2006), injury (Putukian, 2016), coaching style (Blanchard, Amiot, Perreault, Vallerand, & Provencher, 2009; Reinboth & Duda, 2006), expectations of significant others for success (Mountjoy, Rhind, Tilvas, & Leglise, 2015), and transitions through and out of sport (Kuettel, Boyle, & Schmid, 2017; Park, Lavallee, & Tod, 2013). There are also aspects of elite sport participation that can complicate the diagnosis and treatment of athletes experiencing mental illness, such as athletic identity, competitive anxiety, eating and weight requirements, sleep and recovery, and competition and travel schedules (Bär & Markser, 2013; Glick & Horsfall, 2009).

As co-editors of this book, we support the notions that winning “at any cost” is incompatible with a modern responsible sport system that values the human behind the performer and that MH is a core component of any culture of excellence (Henriksen et al., 2019). After being involved in the context of elite sport over many years in our respective countries, it is fair to say that most clubs, national governing bodies, and Olympic committees acknowledge that MH and performance are interlinked. It is our collective view that the relative failure to address MH in sport over the years has been in part due to prevailing stigma and false misconceptions that athletes have an indestructible psyche. However, in today’s society, gaps in adequate MH support are more due to a lack of knowledge, skills, and funding within organizations. Proper care for the MH and psychosocial and emotional development of athletes are generally perceived to be beneficial for all involved. They may contribute to athletes’ performances, the longevity of their career, the quality of their career transitions, and better outcomes upon career termination.

Also, there appears to be increasing evidence that at both the club and national governing body level, considerable interest exists in supporting the MH of players in professional sports (Mitchell et al., 2014). However, the substantive growth in sports science provision in many clubs across Europe (Nesti & Sully, 2014) has not included a similar expansion in mental performance and MH support. Research has revealed that clubs are looking for a lead in how to address the issue of psychological support to enhance the well-being and performance of players while competing for their club and when they exit (e.g., Brown & Portrac, 2009). Yet, the answer is not that simple. Different sports, countries, and athlete populations present multiple contexts that impact how support can be implemented, and there is no one-size-fits-all solution. We envisage that this tour around the world leaves the reader with an understanding of the massive global differences in MH service provision within different contexts, and organizations. The overall aim of the book is to provide researchers, practitioners, coaches, and students with relevant knowledge, and strategies to address MH in elite sport across a variety of contexts.

“Backdrop: The ISSP Think Tank on mental health in elite sport”

During the last years, the world of sport gained increased awareness of MH. In September 2018, on the initiative of the International Society of Sport Psychology (ISSP), the first international Think Tank on Athlete Mental Health was held at the University of Southern Denmark. The purpose of the Think Tank was to unify major sport psychology organizations in a discussion of the current status and future challenges of research and applied aspects of athlete MH, and to develop recommendations for sport organizations and researchers. The Think Tank participants were selected to secure research expertise, applied experience, global representation, and collaboration between key organizations. The ISSP, the European Federation of Sport Psychology (FEPSAC), the Association of Applied Sport Psychology (AASP), and the Asian South Pacific Association of Sport Psychology (ASPASP) were asked to nominate an expert from their organization. Selected professional sport organizations and national Olympic Committees were also offered a voice in this Think Tank. After the meeting, a statement representing the consensus views of the invited group was published (Henriksen et al., 2019). In the statement, the contributors presented six propositions and recommendations to inspire researchers in their work to understand and investigate athlete MH, and sport organizations in their efforts to build elite sport environments that optimally nourish athletes’ MH. These propositions are:

1. MH is a core component of a culture of excellence.

Sporting organizations, practitioners, and researchers should pay attention to athlete MH in all their work to promote athletic performance.

2. MH in a sport context should be better defined.

Researchers should develop a clear definition of MH in sport (1) as more than the absence of mental ill health, (2) as contextualized, (3) as decoupled from performance, and (4) in ways that create space for a variety of emotional states and for periods in which athletes are not able to contribute productively to their team’s on-field performance.

3. Research on MH in sport should broaden the scope of assessment.

Researchers should: (1) develop sport-specific measures of MH; (2) develop tools to screen both athletes and organizations for risk and protective factors; (3) employ multiple methods; (4) provide room for individual narratives that may expand our conceptualization of MH; and (5) recognize the contextual nature of MH.

4. Athlete MH is a major resource for the whole athletic career and the life afterwards. Sport organizations should view their athletes as whole persons and in a life-span perspective, and be extra careful to promote health and thriving, and to reduce threats to MH, during difficult career transitions. Career transition researchers are recommended to pay more direct attention to how MH may affect athletic careers and how career transitions may affect MH.

5. The environment can nourish or malnourish athlete MH.

Researchers should investigate the features of sporting environments that nourish and malnourish athletes’ MH with the aim to develop guidelines to inform sport environments, such as federations, clubs, and talent academies. Sport organizations should consider MH as a criterion of their effectiveness and use the guidelines to openly and critically review the degree to which their environment is a resource for their athletes’ MH.

6. MH is everybody’s business but should be...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Series foreword
• 1 Setting the scene: Mental health in elite sport
• Part I Cases and structures of mental health across countries
• Part II Specific interventions on mental health across countries
• Index