The Olympic Games have highlighted the need for an increase in sport psychology and mental health services for athletes. I’ve had the opportunity to speak about this with several news outlets, but I wanted to further outline my thinking on this topic with a blog post.
We know there is a problem. And we are starting to take steps to solve it, but there is a HUGE body of work that needs to be done. I say this from a professional perspective: I am a Sport Psychology Consultant and dedicate a lot of my time to helping Olympians, Olympic hopefuls, NCAA Division I athletes, and aspiring collegiate athletes reach their performance goals. I was an athlete and competed on the world stage for 9 years, made an Olympic Team, a World Championship Team, and three Commonwealth Games Teams in the 3000m Steeplechase. I have insight into how athletes think and know that the way we provide sport psychology services is not doing enough to create an even playing field for physical and mental health in elite, Olympic sports.
When I was an athlete, I didn’t know how to take advantage of sport psychology services. I knew that the job existed—the job of helping athletes fine-tune their mental performance and manage their mental demons—but I didn’t really know who that person was, where they were, or if they would understand me and my crazy dream of running 7.5 times around the track, jumping into 7 pits of water and over an additional 28 barriers. It can be confusing and often just the energy required to go into detail about my training and my event was enough to deter me from trying to start that relationship (e.g., “oh, you’re like a horse?” or “wow, you run more each week than I drive.”).
Obviously, this is a problem and I have ideas on how to address it. Now I’m on the other side of my professional athletics career working with institutions on how to improve sport psychology and mental health services for athletes and I see barrier after barrier after barrier. Luckily, I was a steeplechaser, so I have experience in clearing barriers. I also made very little money steeplechasing and it was more of a passion career—all of this has served me well in training my ambitions to fix sport psychology and mental health services in Olympic sports (FYI, a lot of the work of sport psychology professionals do with elite, Olympic athletes is unpaid—a true passion!). The biggest problem that was immediately apparent to me in working with Olympic athletes is that there aren’t enough resources (or a willingness to dedicate resources) for embedding sport psychology professionals in athletes’ buildup to major championships (e.g., Olympic and World Championship events). Most teams at the Olympic Games send a sport psychology professional to be there to support the team members. For many on the team, it will be their first time meeting this person. The resource is available, but it could be more impactful. Do you want to start a relationship with a sport psychology practitioner a few days before the biggest meet of your life? Probably not. I know I didn’t.
I started working with Olympic athletes a couple of years ago and I was determined to help make the resources more available, visible, and useful for athletes. A group of sport psychology consultants I collaborate with put forth a big effort to complete a needs analysis with athletes: we wanted to know what they thought about current services and what they wanted in the future. The number one thing we heard was that athletes did not know they had access to sport psychology services. In good cases, athletes said they had heard of the services, but had no idea how to access the services. Some athletes even talked about how they tried to find out how to work with someone but never got any answers. Athletes who had made a previous Olympic team knew that a sport psychologist showed up at major championships but didn’t have much interaction with that person outside of that championship.
Overall, the take-home point from our 2019-2020 research project was that we needed to integrate more with the athletes earlier in the Olympic cycle. We need to go to meets in the years between the Olympics—domestic meets, international meets, ideally even training sessions to help get coach buy-in and gain trust. If the person who is going to help you strengthen your mental game to perform at an Olympic Games gets to see you in training and competition, this is massive in building the relationship and gives the athlete confidence that the sport psychology professional knows the nuances of their sport. People want a choice of who to work with: one person (no matter how amazing they are) does not fit the needs of 200+ athletes from a wide array of backgrounds. Diversity is huge in the sport of track and field, and we need to offer athletes the option to work with a diverse set of sport psychology practitioners.
The model in the above paragraph is the EXACT model that we use for PHYSICAL injury prevention in our Olympic athletes but deviates massively from what we offer for MENTAL injury prevention. If we could model our system to look like what we offer for athletes to ensure physical health, we could actually start closing the gap between physical and mental health support. Athletic trainers go to training sessions, domestic meets, have diversity, and the ability to integrate into the athlete’s journey in the years between Olympic Games. We know that injury prevention works, so why are we only using that model on the physical side and not the mental side?
I challenge you to take a look at the support staff in your sport: how many people are dedicated to helping the physicality of the athletes and how many people are dedicated to supporting the mentality of the athletes? We need to close the gap, even if it’s only slightly, in these number discrepancies. I’ll be advocating for this in the buildup to Paris 2024 and flexing my passion to make progress.
Lennie Waite, PhD, CMPC, OLY