Athletes Anonymous (Acceptance is the First Step)
Devarya Patwardhan
TY BSc Economics
Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
Woohoo! First time writing for the 8:10. Dear Reader, please be kind!
Since independence, India has celebrated its athletes with passion rivaling that of religious festivals; be it the hockey legends of old to the cricketing stars of today and everything in between. Has there ever been a time when you felt afraid to talk to your friends about the result of a cricket match or the podium finishes of an F1 Race?
In the same vein that we speak of celebrity sportspeople and their own problems while representing India on the national level, at our very own university level, all student-athletes face problems that very few are willing to talk about and even fewer that actually engage in such conversation. While we highlight the achievements of university-level athletes and idolise them, this adulation may lead to higher mental burden and increased vulnerability to mental health issues like depression, to name a popular one.
The connection between physical activity and mental well-being is becoming increasingly well researched. Pluhar has shown that active engagement in sports in youth has led to fewer mental health disorders, such as anxiety and depression, but the kind of engagement mentioned here does not reflect this. In a study of young athletes, a lower percentage reported having anxiety or depression compared to national averages for adolescents. This suggests that sports may act as an effective buffer against the onset of psychological issues.
Your parents’ constant insistence on “Get off your phone and get out of the house” may have some truth behind it. General exercise provides psychological effects indeed, but organised sports seem to have a greater impact in comparison. Pluhar also suggests that youth athletes in organised sports have a positive correlation with adolescent mental health as compared to other physical activities. Looking at it from the psychological viewpoint, sports boost an athlete’s confidence while at the same time providing a distraction from their negative thoughts.
However, not all athletes are created equal when it comes to mental health and in a similar vein, neither are their sports. The type of sport, i.e. whether it is a team sport or an individual sport, each appears to have separate and distinct mental health outcomes. Pluhar found that a significantly higher proportion of individual sport athletes reported an anxiety or depression diagnosis as compared to those athletes in team sports.
In my opinion, the cause lies in the nature of the sports, wherein team sports offer a two-pronged support system in the form of both teammates and coaches; whereas in individual sports, there is only your coach as a good support system. This difference in support systems may increase the level of mental burden and isolation problems that individual sports athletes suffer from. The sense of community and shared goals can create a buffer against the pressures of competition. Another way to look at this is that in individual sports, athletes experience greater pressure and expectations, as their success or failure rests entirely on their own performance. This mental pressure is a major contributor to depressive symptoms, which one might experience after losing matches or tournaments. This single-minded focus on goals in individual sports may lead to the athletes losing their enjoyment of the sports as well.
Seeing the benefits of sports as well as their psychological impacts on athletes, let us take a look at how physical symptoms correlate to psychological impact. Overtraining is a state of poor mental and physical functioning due to inadequate rest between training periods. This leads to mood disorders and is an indicator of an athlete and their support system’s inability to adapt to training stress. The extreme form of this is burnout, where there is complete mental and physical exhaustion because they are unable to keep up with the intense training.
It’s also worth noting that gender can play a role in this vulnerability. Hagiwara has found that amongst American female college athletes, there’s a negative correlation between social support received and depressive symptoms reported. Khan shows that in Bangladesh, it’s not just self-imposed mental burdens but also higher barriers by families towards females as compared to males. These barriers are a result of societal norms and stigmas that have been incorporated into their culture over generations, making the bar much higher for female athletes to even get the opportunity to succeed. These are things that highlight the need to structure support systems differently for the genders and differently in the respective countries. For example, in the USA, the system is geared towards the promotion of sports and athletics from the university level onwards and almost reaching levels of commercialisation that haven’t been seen before. This shows that the support system for athletes in the USA should be made with their mental health in mind to adjust to the increased mental burden that comes with the adulation of their masses.
The point of this article is to show that while sports are considered a good mode of promoting mental health, it is not a “one size fits all” solution. We need to recognise the fact that there are risks to the process (even though the benefits are undeniable) and recognising these risks, factoring them into your decision-making is the most sure-fire way to help keep your mental health in a good place. (We don’t talk about academic depression here, even I don’t know how to fix that).
Sports is not too dissimilar to life, in the sense that it’s a double-edged sword; it is a source of joy and relief but also of pain and hardship. So the next time you see your friendly neighbourhood athlete, do a quick check on them to see if they really are okay.
this is really insightful!