This current generation of elite athletes are enjoying a new appreciation of the importance of mental health when it comes to their well-being but there could yet be significant room for improvement in terms of how mental health support is provided to athletes in developing countries, new research has found.
The University of Stirling has established itself as one of the leading sports universities in the UK and it has led new research which concludes that current approaches to mental health in sport are too clinical, Westernised, and can be out of touch with the lived realities of athletes in low and middle-income countries.
The paper which was published in the Sports Medicine journal and was led by Dr Andrew Kirkland, Lecturer in Sports Coaching in the Faculty of Health Sciences and Sport at the University of Stirling, also includes input from a range of experts from across the globe, shone a spotlight on the complex, and often overlooked, mental health challenges faced by Kenya's world-renowned distance runners.
Kenya has long been one of the world’s leading nations when it comes to producing elite distance runners, with Faith Kipyegon and Eliud Kipchoge two of the higher-profile athletes to hail from the east-African nation, but this study has found that for mental health support to be most effective, it must better reflect the cultural and structural realities in countries like Kenya.
“We argue that global efforts to support elite athletes often rely on Western biomedical models that assume access to robust health systems,” says Dr Kirkland.
"We suggest that the consensus statement and the wider mental discourse in sport should be framed more comprehensively. This framing needs to reflect the complex and context specific nature of mental health, particularly in low and middle-income countries.”
The paper concludes by making four recommendations which are: co-create evidence in which the perspectives of stakeholders who are not clinicians are given more importance; focus on establishing treatments and interventions that reflect the complex context-specific and culturally-sensitive nature of mental health; have deeper awareness of, and focus on, issues that cut across different mental health conditions when developing sustainable processes and treatments; and develop treatments that can be realistically accessed by, and tailored to, the needs of athletes and that can be delivered by non-specialists.
