Mental health disclosure in the public eye: accounting for and managing absences from professional sporting competition

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this paper is to consider how professional sports players and their sporting clubs and associations publicly manage the disclosure of mental health issues that result in a players enforced absence from competition. The paper focuses on official or authorised press statements, press conferences (and transcripts thereof), social media posts and official websites, to consider public discourses and media coverage of mental health in professional sport. The research is informed by the principles and methods of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. Presented here are two retrospective ‘mental injury’ timelines from two professional sports players in the UK (namely Sarah Taylor, cricketer and Aaron Lennon, footballer), starting with the initial announcement that the player will not be participating and ending with the announcement of their reintegration into their team’s routine match day activities. Several important findings have emerged, including whether the original announcement was (in)voluntary; the categorisation of mental health conditions employed; the details made public in press statements and what is added in subsequent press conferences and interviews; and the open-ended return time-frames. At stake is how a player’s (patient) confidentiality clashes with the need to reliably and accurately inform the public, via the media, in these cases.

KEYWORDS:

• Professional sport
• mental health
• stigma
• press conferences
• social media
• gender
• ethnomethodology

Acknowledgments

The paper is indebted to Derek Edwards who helped identify some of the media sources for the cases and discussed some of the ideas contained in the final paper. Gratitude is extended to Peter Winter and Andrew Clifton who provided comments on the final draft. An early version was presented at De Montfort University’s School of Allied Health Sciences annual Research Conference on 3 July 2017.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Applied sport psychology’s conceptual armoury offers one preventative solution to mental health concerns in the form of ‘mental toughness’ (MT) that elite performers are claimed to possess. Jones et al.’s (2002, 2007) MT framework describes a ‘psychological edge’ comprising a unique set of characteristics possessed by athletes that include coping strategies, resilience, focus and self-belief in their own ability, especially in response to perceived failure (see also Bull et al. 2005; Coulter, Mallet, and Gucciardi 2010; Crust, Swann, and Allen-Collinson 2016). Hypothetically the upshot of these personal attributes should mean that individual competitors develop effective coping strategies that limit the impact of stressful situations upon their performances and general mental health. Andersen (2011) critiqued MT for its misleading and idealised language (e.g. ‘no pain, no gain’), its focus on outcomes in which failure is the athlete’s failure and its blindness to the psychological impact of ignoring distress (Bauman 2016; Gucciardi, Hanton, and Fleming 2017). This emphasis on mental toughness could be damaging as it may prevent or delay timely help-seeking due to the stigma attached.

2. The case of former England international cricketer Marcus Trescothick (2008) is instructive here. At various points, his ‘depression’ (as it was later diagnosed) was officially described as a ‘migraine,’ ‘family, personal reasons,’ ‘a bug,’ and ‘stress-related illness’.

3. Thomas McCabe’s (2018) content analysis of 2017 UK newspaper coverage of mental health in professional sport identified a total of 92 articles, 75% male athletes and 25% female, with footballers (n=27) and cricketers (n=14) featured, diagnoses of depression (n=38), concussion (n=27) and cocaine use (n=13), and exactly 50/50 split between active and retired players. More work of this kind is necessary to track any increase in media coverage regarding mental health in professional sports.

4. Newspaper coverage incorporates other membership categories and descriptions. For instance, the Mail Online’s (2017) original headline read ‘£55,000-a-week England Footballer Aaron Lennon is detained under Mental Health Act after stand-off with police’. Following criticism about its appropriateness, the headline was changed to ‘England footballer Aaron Lennon is detained under Mental Health Act after stand-off with police next to a busy road’.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christopher Elsey

Christopher Elsey is currently a VC2020 Lecturer in Health and Well Being in the Leicester School of Allied Health Sciences at De Montfort University. Methodologically his research primarily utilises video recordings to investigate work-place practices, activities and sites of learning, informed by the sociological research traditions of ethnomethodology, conversation analysis and symbolic interactionism. The worksite settings analysed to date include medical consultations (e.g. GP, Memory Clinics), air force communication and military inquiries, and an educational setting for adults with learning difficulties. Currently he is researching professional sport and mental health, and medical neutrality in armed conflict situations.