Reardon CL, Hainline B, Aron CM, Baron D, Baum AL, Bindra A, et al. In 2019, the International Olympic Committee released a comprehensive statement with recommendations for mental health care of elite athletes. Breaking a taboo: why the International Olympic Committee convened experts to develop a consensus statement on mental health in elite athletes. Also, sports organizations and government policies for sports should encourage elite athletes to develop a mindset of continuous care for their well-being. This should include, for instance, training coaches to identify early signs of mental suffering and encourage their athletes to seek treatment when necessary. Therefore, risk factors for mental disorders in athletes should be identified, and specific interventions should be crafted. Mental health symptoms and disorders in elite athletes: a systematic review on cultural influencers and barriers to athletes seeking treatment. Castaldelli-Maia JM, Gallinaro JG, Falcão RS, Gouttebarge V, Hitchcock ME, Hainline B, et al. This is likely aggravated by high levels of stigma that prevent elite athletes from seeking treatment. Occurrence of mental health symptoms and disorders in current and former elite athletes: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Gouttebarge V, Castaldelli-Maia JM, Gorczynski P, Hainline B, Hitchcock ME, Kerkhoffs GM, et al. The same happens with alcohol use disorder. The prevalence of depression/anxiety in elite athletes is 34%, higher than in the general population. But, at the end of the day, how else would people accommodate their needs for heroes? This engenders a way of living that mental health professionals would hardly recommend to their patients, and a double standard for elite athletes is surprisingly accepted in our society. Inspiring biographies are pervaded by real-world suffering from excessive training loads and media exposure, harassment, fear of failure, and a super-human need for consistently outstanding performances. The sacrifices demanded from athletes to achieve success are often abusive. Biles’s, Osaka’s, Comaneci’s, and many others’ fight reveals a concerning aspect of elite athletics: their busy lives, hectic routines, and high standards do not take mental health into account. The legendary perfect-ten gymnast Nadia Comaneci also publicly discussed her struggle with bulimia and anorexia, further exacerbated by the urge to maintain the high level of performance that others expected from her. She described symptoms of depression and social anxiety that are worsened by press conferences. Her struggle ironically started when she won her first Grand Slam, the 2018 US Open.
Naomi Osaka withdraws from French Open & reveals ‘bouts of depression’. Two months earlier, tennis player Naomi Osaka quit the French Open due to “long bouts of depression.” 1 1. Her bold attitude leaves a perfect stage for mental health professionals to discuss the burden carried by high-level athletes and how costly the “winning at any cost” mentality can be.īiles was not the first. Biles gave up the opportunity to repeat her four-gold-medal-winning performance in Rio 2016 for an even more worthwhile goal: her mental health, and she has been intensely praised and criticized ever since. The whole world was shocked when, on July 28, 2021, the gymnastic superstar Simone Biles decided to abandon the Olympic Games in Tokyo.
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