Every measure is taken to protect athletes from physical injury in competitive sports, while protection from mental injury is neglected.   Yet athletes face extraordinary risks of mental trauma in competition.

We insist upon helmets and other safety gear and impose stringent rules enforced by referees to protect athletes from physical injury, but as the recent Olympics highlights, the athletes remain vulnerable to psychological trauma.

Competitive athletes face extraordinary stresses in competition which are known to increase the risk of many mental disabilities.  The stakes are highest for elite athletes competing on a national or international arena, but all athletic competitors confront these same risks.  They include the prospect of failure, social exclusion and subordination, shame, embarrassment, anxiety, peer pressure, emotional distress, disability from physical injury, and loss of career prospects and financial support.   In the Olympics, unfortunately, we must add to this list, national pride and even harsh criticism by prominent politicians.  Sadly, as the tragedy suffered by American female gymnasts illustrates, female athletes face risks of sexual harassment and outright sexual abuse, a strong risk factor for many mental illnesses.  Many examples in the recent Olympics could be cited, but I will not name them here, because the competitors should be known only by their participation and performance in athletic competition.

The psychological harms that are associated with these stresses include maladaptive behaviors such as binge drinking, substance abuse, drunk driving, depression, sustained negative affect, withdrawing from the sport, and suicidal ideation.  Several studies report that athletes experiencing choking under pressure suffer intense emotions that can lead to suicidal thoughts.  Choking under pressure in athletic competition is common.  77% of athletes experience choking in the last year of competing in their sport.  On average, these athletes choked 18.25 times during that year.  According to the same study, 10% of high-performance athletes succumb to suicidal ideation.

There should be no more shame in an athlete falling out of competition after reaching a psychological limit than if they had fallen on the track upon reaching a physiological limit.  Both mind and body are pushed to the utmost extreme in athletic competition.

The sphere of pressure in the Olympics and in other elite competitive sports extends beyond the community of athletes in competition and the spectators, to include the public at large.  The hurt is often inflamed by sensational, sometimes cruel reporting by the media.  The recent Olympics offers many examples of psychologically harmful media reporting over controversies concerning an athlete’s performance failures, mental toughness, issues related to their gender, and shame from choking under pressure or quitting in competition when an athlete reaches a psychological limit.

I would like to see more awareness of the potential for psychological trauma in athletic competition, and effective efforts taken to protect against it.  Competitors and coaches should be as aware of the risks of psychological trauma in sports as they are of the physical risks, and as well-versed in effective measures to respond to broken hearts as they are in giving first aid to broken bones.  I would like to see the media take a more responsible approach to reporting, and cease propagating irresponsible harmful comments and behavior by officials and others, including criticisms by politicians and others in the public eye, who are simply exploiting the harm for their personal gain.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if instead of the lonely three medal winners standing on stage at the wards ceremony, they were surrounded by all their teammates and the athletes on the other teams who gave their all and made the competition possible.  Why not honor them first as the Olympic theme song plays, and then applaud the medal winners in unison with all the athletes and spectators?

The medal ceremony for the women’s uneven bars at the London 2012 Summer Olympics. Photo by James Cridland from London, UK – Victory ceremony, CC BY 2.0

In my view, more should be done to honor all the athletes in elite competition.  Clearly, any competitor in the Olympics, or in other elite sports arena, excels in performance incomparably beyond any spectator.  The division between fame and glory is especially thin and psychologically sharper when winners and losers are separated by miniscule differences in performance–finish times so close that they exceed the limit of human perception, or wobbling a bit too much after hurling, spinning, and back flipping in the air across a gym floor, or if they splash a tiny bit too much after executing an astounding triple summersault with a full twist off the diving board.  Yet this slender dividing line is what will define the athlete as loser.  The bigger losers are those of us who accept the mental trauma that an athlete can suffer in competitive sports.

R. Douglas Fields, Psychology Today