Mental Health Issues In High Level Sports

Recently many high-level sports people, including Olympian swimmers Ian Thorpe and Libby Trickett, have admitted to suffering from mental health issues such as depression and anxiety. Although sport has many positive impacts on personal wellbeing, such as a sense of achievement, social interaction and fitness, other aspects of competitive sport increase vulnerability to mental health issues. Key negative factors include intense training schedules, high standards, or failure to achieve goals and loss of identity or purpose once retired. Poor mental health is mainly an issue for an athlete’s own wellbeing, but will also affect their sporting career and the perception of that sport by others.

For many people sport and exercise can have a positive

Many people experience stress throughout their life and it can often seem unbearable. So, it isn’t hard to understand how the extra prolonged stress created by daily training, in an attempt to succeed, would give sports people an added vulnerability to mental health illnesses. AFL star, Lance Franklin is a prime example of this. Although he hasn’t directly blamed his poor mental state on football, he did say it was partly due to the stress in his life, and a short-term break from the added stresses of AFL allowed him to get back on track. Lance said "The best thing that I've done is put my hand up to get the help that I

Who will they become when that phase of their lives are over, whether due to age, declining performance, or injury? Libby Trickett, for example, said, "I definitely struggled. Without a doubt. That's why I came back… the first time I retired I… had a massive identity crisis, I didn't know who I was outside of the pool, I didn't know who I wanted to be.” For some a short term solution may mean returning to their sport, or continuing with as much sport as possible, but at some point most will need to start over from scratch in building something