Athletes need mental health support beyond performance psychology

.....At Ithaca College, the vast majority of mental health support for athletes centers on performance in competition. The college’s sport psychology graduate program includes opportunities for students to work with individual athletes and sports teams at the college on their mental training. Teams that participate in sports psychology sessions cover topics like effective goal setting, resilience and stress management during competition.

Mental illness is notably absent from the curriculum. Instead, athletes are taught in spaces like the Sports Leadership Academy that they are only committed to their teams if they are constantly putting in extra work. They are taught that a real leader never has two bad days in a row. They are taught that the pandemic is a time to accelerate, not a time to coast. While these messages can be encouraging and inspirational for some, they can also be incredibly damaging, especially to athletes who are struggling the most with their mental health......

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Bethany`s Notes: Mental health for athletes goes way above sports psychology. Honestly, most mental health issues are systemic and have connections to all parts of your life, even all the back to childhood. We cannot just address performance because that only scrapes the surface of the larger issues.