Why the study?
Mental health symptoms and disorders are common and impair performance in elite athletes, but evidence- or consensus-based guidelines for their diagnosis and management are lacking.
This consensus statement provides recommendations for the diagnosis and management of mental health symptoms and disorders in elite athletes, emphasizing the need to address biopsychosocial factors and optimize training environments.
Offers standardized mental health guidance for elite athletes; leaves open prospective validation before routine adoption.
Mental health symptoms and disorders are common among elite athletes, may have sport related manifestations within this population and impair performance. Mental health cannot be separated from physical health, as evidenced by mental health symptoms and disorders increasing the risk of physical injury and delaying subsequent recovery. There are no evidence or consensus based guidelines for diagnosis and management of mental health symptoms and disorders in elite athletes. Diagnosis must differentiate character traits particular to elite athletes from psychosocial maladaptations.Management strategies should address all contributors to mental health symptoms and consider biopsychosocial factors relevant to athletes to maximise benefit and minimise harm. Management must involve both treatment of affected individual athletes and optimising environments in which all elite athletes train and compete. To advance a more standardised, evidence based approach to mental health symptoms and disorders in elite athletes, an International Olympic Committee Consensus Work Group critically evaluated the current state of science and provided recommendations.
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Reardon et al. (2019) studied this question.
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