HHW Podcast: Student Athlete Mental Health

Duke University has been working to de-stigmatize mental health for student-athletes. They offer resources, but many athletes still struggle with burnout and reaching out for help. Duke is hiring more sports psychologists and has a collaboration between the athletics department and the CAPS team. However, not all athletes are aware of these resources and may feel overwhelmed with the demands of academics and athletics. It is important to break the stigma and encourage athletes to seek help when needed. Four years ago, Duke University announced the death of one of its own student-athletes. Morgan Rogers, a women's lacrosse player who inspired the creation of Morgan's Message, struggled with mental and physical health after a career-ending injury leading to her suicide in 2019. Since, advocacy organizations like Morgan's Message have worked to de-stigmatize the conversation about mental health for student-athletes and ensure they are aware of resources for their health care. Still, athletes at many universities struggle with burnout, mental health, and reaching out for help when they need it. Duke University has list upon list of resources for student health and well-being, but do its best to receive the right support given their extreme workload and stress. From being on the volleyball team and finishing my first season, I've come to understand some of the demands of student-athletes. For my team specifically, we have been at Duke's great lifting and processing since the beginning of July, and our season just ended at the end of November. Since it is a very long season, we were not allowed to go out during school break. It makes sense that many athletes would stay to practice. During the pre-season, Duke practiced mostly twice a day, and in-season, we lifted weights twice a week, practiced four times a week, and practiced two times a week with one mandatory off-season. The demands for our practice are just one of those. Traveling as a student-athlete is hard because you miss classes and it can be difficult to catch up. For volleyball, we would leave on Thursday morning or afternoon to return back to Duke on Sunday night, so we would miss cheating classes whenever we had to leave. This makes it hard to maintain a good balance between academics and athletes. Because you don't have a lot of free time, you could be sleeping less to ensure you finish all of your work. This exhaustion is one thing that can lead to burnout, but it's not an easy student. We interviewed Derek Sokoloff, a current Ph.D. student of clinical psychology and sports psychologist intern with the Duke CAP support team. We were curious about his thoughts about burnout in college athletes and the student-athlete experience at Duke specifically. We asked about available mental health resources, as well as how well those resources are utilized, to discover ways the school prioritizes mental health. He led us into some common causes of burnout that he sees, as well as initiatives that Duke and its support staff are taking to support student-athletes here. I think very early on in the transition from high school to college to be a student-athlete, it's very common. You have local, regional, and state level, as well as national level, and even at some stages, there's only a decent amount of the basketball players, but especially the student-athletes, and so there's this aspect that I'm going from all of this variety of high school athletes to a college student-athlete, their very own college student-athlete. That's a lot of the results that we said they would require. If you are not going to be successful in a way, or if you take a moment of transition, which is happening, that can lead to a feeling of responsibility. Why am I struggling? Why am I not getting people to come to this? Why am I not converting? Why am I not going to high school? And really, this internalization of these thoughts, when you think about it, can lead to athletes really kind of just stressed out in high school. I just want to talk about that. It's just one element of burnout. Another element of burnout can be being a college student-athlete, you are going through a process, trying to destabilize the people of mental health, and create awareness around mental health issues, because as you say, at a very large level, community level, we're not just college students, but the world, depression, anxiety, all of these things are stigmatized. And I've been talking about this, and it's something I've been talking about, and as a field of psychology, a very large field of psychology, our role is to help individuals feel more comfortable about talking about these issues. I will say in terms of what is important, that we have three full-time licensed psychologists, and one full-time, I believe it's a licensed counselor, but really it's a full-time staff of four, which is really important. And it's a very large staff. I think comparatively to other institutions, Duke is probably one of the larger athletic departments that plays a connective fit on mental health, with the amount of individuals that have mental health issues. I do want to say, I just recently had the post-doc position at SAU, and more and more post-doc positions are being opened in colleges that work specifically with athletics. And so what I think we're going to see for the next 10 years, not just here, but more broadly across the United States, is new listening, expansion, and new positions are available for sports psychologists or really just psychologists, or not even psychologists, but more mental health professionals as well, should fit within these athletic departments. I do think that more and more athletic departments are acknowledging that there is a need for mental health services, and I think that that's going to be a push to get positions like that open. And I do think that what we're seeing, what we've had over the last 10 years is that more and more positions are open, not that more and more people are being hired in these positions. This position that I'm in is just a, is a testament to the amount of collaboration that we're doing. Also, the fact that it's for a room after two is a testament to that collaboration. And yeah, I think just the focus on just raising interest among student-athletes, and the generosity of the body as well, is something that will always help us. Mr. Zagloff speaks very highly of Duke's current support staff and services for student-athletes. Duke is hiring two full-time sports psychologists next year, in addition to the current intern position, which puts it ahead of many colleges who do not even have a single designated position. Even when looking for internships, Duke is one of only 11 job sites offering a position specific to the field of sports psychology out of more than a thousand listings. Mr. Zagloff speaks about how he respects Duke's commitment to student-athletes and their mental health and how the school supports them. He's also very hopeful about the growing field of sports psychology and what it means for breaking the stigma of mental health. One question that remains, though, is how many students are actually utilizing the available resources. The current collaboration, even between the athletics department and the CAPS team, has been promoted to Duke student-athletes, but the utilization of these services is unclear. So the athletics department is clearly putting effort into providing resources for students' psychological and physical well-being. Not all athletes are aware of these resources. I talked to freshman Lily Fucci, a walk-on student-athlete on the Duke cheer team, who said neither she nor her teammates were aware of Duke's athletics, mental health, and performance department or any of the resources. I feel like a lot of people just go through it, and personally, I'm not one to dwell on the stress. Instead of stressing, I'll just go kind of get out of practice, kind of get myself going and just finish things I have to. Fucci said that she definitely feels overwhelmed with schoolwork given the very little time she has to spend on it, pointing out that the cheer team attends football, men's basketball, and women's basketball games nearly every week in addition to multiple three-hour practices. However, despite being stressed when academics and athletics conflict, she notes that the general culture among student-athletes is to just power through on their own. It could have been mentioned, but I haven't heard anyone talk about it. I'm sure other athletes use it. I haven't heard of anyone close to me using it. Although Duke's athletic department seems to offer many resources to combat student-athletes' stress or other mental difficulties, not all student-athletes are aware or take advantage of them. Instead of reaching out for help, they allow themselves to be overworked and burned out by a combination of social, academic, and athletic pressures leading to possible mental and physical health complications down the road. As described by historian and author Benj Ainsfield in their essay, Etiquette Complex, burnout is a continuous failure to reach the impossible expectations we set for ourselves. Duke athletes, similar to their counterparts at many other universities, are used to being high-achieving in many areas of their lives, so transitioning to an elite academic and athletic atmosphere can cause severe stress and disappointment. Duke has a lot of resources for mental health, but not everyone knows about them or how to use them. They are trying to help by providing many resources, but it might not be in the most effective way. It is possible for athletes to feel lost in their craft because they might not know how to reach out or not want to. There is no stigma around getting help for mental health as an athlete because there is a stereotype about athletes being strong and competitive, and if you need to receive help and help, you can seek it. Also, if people see that you can get by, they can feel like they are wrong for needing extra support. Duke has four mental health professionals for about 800 student-athletes, but is this enough? It may be good in comparison to other universities, but one staff member for every 200 student-athletes is not a good ratio. But sports psychology is a growing field and will only continue to improve because the demand for sports psychologists is increasing. Duke, for example, is adding two more full-time licensed psychologists to the athletics department next year. What we think would really help athletes increase their utilization of these resources is to establish the resources and how to use them as clearly as possible so everyone is confident in what to do if they need help.