Sports Psychology

Athletes Speaking Out about Mental Health

Many professional athletes report that they live in a culture that discourages speaking out about personal problems, including mental health problems, because they are pressured not to create a distraction or bring negative attention to their team. Recently, some athletes have begun to challenge that harmful culture, talking about how their seemingly glamorous lifestyles are filled with struggles and challenges. Former National Hockey League player Colin Wilson wrote two separate articles for a website called The Player’s Tribune : the first addressed his struggles with obsessive-compulsive disorder and the feeling that his life was often out of his control, while the second opened up about how that struggle led to an addiction to painkillers, sleeping pills, and cocaine. higher quality of life and have written open letters or newspaper articles about their struggles with issues like depression. Finally, sports teams usually give applied sports psychologists a great deal of leeway to come up with their own solutions to problems, meaning that they have greater independence at their job. Clinical Sports Psychologists: “Normal” Psychology A clinical sports psychologist is probably the most similar career to what youmight think of as a traditional psychologist: someone who sees patients in their office, talks about their concerns, and works toward finding a solution. Those particular sports psychologists are referred to as “clinical,” because the term in the medical

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Sports Psychology