Consensus statement on improving the mental health of high performance athletes

By Kristoffer Henriksen, R. Schinke, K. Moesch, S. McCann, William D. Parham, C. Larsen, P. Terry. International Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 2019

303 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This consensus statement is the product of an international Think Tank on the initiative of the International Society of Sport Psychology. The purpose of the Think Tank was to unify major sport psychology organizations in a discussion of the current status and future challenges of applied and research aspects of athlete mental health. The contributors present six propositions and recommendations to inspire sport organizations and researchers. The propositions are: Mental health is a core component of a culture of excellence; Mental health in a sport context should be better defined; Research on mental health in sport should broaden the scope of assessment; Athlete mental health is a major resource for the whole athletic career and life post-athletic career; The environment can nourish or malnourish athlete mental health; and Mental health is everybody’s business but should be overseen by one or a few specified members. It is recommended that researchers unite to develop a more contextualized definition of athlete mental health and more comprehensive strategies of assessment, as well as join forces with sporting organizations to investigate sustainable elite sport environments and the role of the mental health officer. Sport organizations are advised to recognize athlete mental health as a core component of a healthy elite sport system and a key indicator of their effectiveness, support research initiatives, and to promote the mental health literacy of all their staff while engaging a mental health officer with the responsibility to oversee a support system.

Subfields: Cardiology and Cardiovascular Medicine, Developmental and Educational Psychology, Orthopedics and Sports Medicine

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In Developmental and Educational Psychology

In Orthopedics and Sports Medicine

Citations in the corpus

Athlete mental health in the Olympic/Paralympic quadrennium: a multi-societal consensus statement (2020, background): “Over the last three years, a number of position and consensus statements on athlete mental health have been published by the FEPSAC (Moesch et al., 2018), the ISSP (Schinke et al., 2017), the IOC (Reardon et al., 2019), the Canadian Centre for Mental Health and Sport (Van Slingerland et al., 2019), ”
Career development and transitions of athletes: the International Society of Sport Psychology Position Stand Revisited (2020, background): “The authors of the consensus statement on improving athletes’ mental health (Henriksen et al., 2019) emphasised that mental health is everybody’s business but should be somebody’s main responsibility and suggested a mental health”
Risk and protective factors for mental health in elite athletes: a scoping review (2019, methodology): “Athletes with high levels of well-being have a better chance of performing well, particularly over the long term (Henriksen et al., 2019).”
Preliminary psychometric validation of a brief screening tool for athlete mental health among male elite athletes: the Athlete Psychological Strain Questionnaire (2019, background): “Interest in the domain of elite athlete mental health is reflected in recent consensus statements outlining mental health symptom identification and management in sports-specific and elite environments (Henriksen et al., 2019; Moesch et al., 2018; Reardon et al., 2019).”