Perceptions of peer mental health: impact of race and student-athlete status

Abstract

Objective: This study used a multi-faceted methodological approach to examine if peer perceptions of stereotyped student groups’ mental health needs varied by target race and student-athlete status.

Participants: In Study 1, 502 university students completed an online experiment. Study 2 data were drawn from the American College Health Association (ACHA)-National College Health Assessment (N = 65,167) and Healthy Minds Study (N = 43,487).

Methods: Study 1 participants rated the severity of various mental health concerns for Black non-student-athletes, White non-student-athletes, Black student-athletes, or White student-athletes. Study 2 conceptualized peer perceptions vis-à-vis mental health patterns in national data.

Results: Study 1 generally revealed lower perceived severity of mental health concerns for Black non-student-athletes. In contrast, Study 2 patterns revealed more variations across student status groups, including that Black non-student-athletes exhibited relatively high prevalence rates of numerous mental health concerns.

Conclusions: Results may suggest mental health under-/over-pathologizing, with implications for training and peer-to-peer mental health interventions.

Keywords:

• Over-pathologizing
• peer mental health
• race/ethnicity
• student-athletes
• under-pathologizing

Disclaimer

The opinions, findings, and conclusions presented/reported in this article/presentation are those of the authors, and are in no way meant to represent the corporate opinions, views, or policies of the ACHA . ACHA does not warrant nor assume any liability or responsibility for the accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of any information presented in this article/presentation.

Conflict of interest disclosure

The authors have no conflicts of interest to report. The authors confirm that the research presented in this article met the ethical guidelines, including adherence to the legal requirements, of the United States and received approval from the Institutional Review Board of Arizona State University.

Notes

1 The biosketches were developed by the authors for the present study. To this end, the second author explored examples of academic personal statements and biosketches available on the internet to consider overall format and content to include before developing the biosketches. Each author then provided feedback on the overall presentation, and minor iterations were made. The final biosketches were then printed, redacted manually, and scanned to give the appearance of a paper form scanned into academic records.

2 Some constructs assessed by the HMS were not included due to insufficient sample sizes for tests of proportions (n ≤ 5), including ADHD diagnosis, learning disability diagnosis, substance abuse/addiction diagnosis, depression/suicidality academic impact, anxiety academic impact, substance use academic impact, ADHD academic impact, and learning disability academic impact.

Additional information

Funding

This article was funded by the Arizona State University Global Sport Institute.