It began with a 21-year-old found dead in his apartment last Tuesday, a rifle and a handwritten suicide note beside him. It continued with the record holder for Olympic gold medals coming forward about his own suicidal thoughts. Athletes of all sports and across all levels of the game have opened up on social media about a hot topic coming to light after the events of the last week—mental health and the toll it is taking on athletes.
Tyler Hilinski, the expected starting quarterback for Washington State University next season, was the initial cause of the social media uproar after the football player died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head Jan. 16. Friends and teammates of Hilinski took to Twitter to offer condolences to his family, followed by athletes from across the nation using the opportunity to remind their followers of the negative side of social media when it comes to athletes losing big games and upsetting their “fans.”
“Student-athletes and athletes in general are more than just your entertainment,” Stanford University football player Justin Reid said on Twitter Jan. 18. “We’re people who go through anxiety, depression and difficulties just like everybody else. Please remember that when you’re Tweeting at us like we’re animals.”
Olympic Gold Medalist Michael Phelps also brought up the issue of mental health at a conference in Chicago days after Hilinski’s death, sharing his personal encounter with depression and admitting to suicidal thoughts of his own, specifically after the 2012 Olympics.
“I didn’t want to be in the sport anymore,” Phelps said. “I didn’t want to be alive anymore. You do contemplate suicide.”
Although some of the stigma surrounding the discussion of mental health has been overcome in recent years, the specific mental health challenges student-athletes and athletes in general face have yet to really be discussed. Many non-student athletes consider their athletic counterparts to have “unfair privileges,” but few can imagine the mental stress and pressure collegiate athletes face each semester, as they work to juggle practices, workouts, classes and a social life.
Following the 2014 suicide of Madison Holleran, a soccer player and track runner at the University of Pennsylvania, a national dialogue about mental illness and thoughts of suicide among college students finally began, with data showing that fewer than 25 NCAA Division I schools in 2014 had a full-time, licensed mental health practitioner on staff in the athletic department, according to ESPN, with even fewer in Division II and III schools.
According to Susannah Pugh, a graduate mental health counseling student at John Brown University, one in four Division I athletes will develop depression, anxiety or have an eating disorder within their four years of athletic eligability at the collegiate level.
“Student-athletes are expected to put on a mask everyday, no matter what’s bothering them internally,” Rachol West said on Twitter Jan. 17. “They’re expected to practice and perform on and off the court, regardless of what may be going on in their everyday lives.”
While a 2016 survey shows that mental health professionals are now in as many as 39 percent of Division I athletic departments, there is still work to be done to get student-athletes the mental health care they need, especially when, according to Julie Kliegman, they “often only have access to the support they need physically. When players are expected to leave the athletic department’s facilities to seek care, they get the message that they’re outsiders, that what they’re dealing with isn’t a problem common among their peers. They can get the impression that they need to separate who they are as student-athletes from the ways in which their brains work.”
If there is anything the events of last week should teach us, it is that this stereotype that “students-athletes are tough somehow or more put together than others,” according to NCAA chief medical officer Brain Hainline, must come to an end. People are people, and sometimes people suffer from mental illnesses, whether they can throw a touchdown pass, hit a homerun or not.
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Timely article and well written