We shouldn’t ignore mental health!

Via VICE SPORTS this article is a breath of fresh air – looking at athlete mental health in a more rounded way and a profile on a new programme underway in the US under University of Nevada, Las Vegas psychology professor Dr. Brad Donohue.

“While sport psychology is focused primarily on performance, the preventative and therapeutic benefits it could provide have gone largely unexplored, as scientists, athletes, coaches, and leagues chase victory, but ignore mental health.

“I think that there have been a lot of professional efforts, usually through sports psychologists, that have worked on sport performance, and often times that’s what coaches and athletic administrators consider the most important thing, the athletes consider that the most important thing. They focus on those areas, and unfortunately, they have life events around them; sport performance is just a small percentage of their life, and so they have all these life goals that they need to accomplish or life stresses that are out there that act to kind of contaminate their sport performance.”

Click here to read the entire VICE SPORTS article