Key result
Increased knowledge exchanges between sports psychiatry and forensic psychiatry are essential to address complex medicolegal issues, such as anti-doping offenses and medical malpractice in elite sports.
Highlights the need for interdisciplinary collaboration between forensic and sports psychiatry to address mental health in elite athletes.
Recently, renowned athletes have shown increasing willingness to discuss mental health. For instance, Olympic-winning gymnast, Simone Biles (1), tennis champion, Naomi Osaka (2), and cricket captain, Ben Stokes (3). Such prominent dialogues can help expand mental health literacy in competitive sports, where stigmatization represents an enduring help-seeking barrier (4). Significantly, these accounts also reflect scientific developments in sports psychiatry, an emerging interdisciplinary subspeciality and part of the broader area of sports medicine. Sports psychiatry encompasses wide-ranging expertise and clinical domains (5, 6), and has been pivotal in illuminating risk factors and mental illness rates in elite athletes (7), alongside the benefits of sports and exercise within prevention and therapeutic programmes (8). Independent societies focusing on sports psychiatry have been created [e.g., (9)] and major international associations have established dedicated sections [e.g., (10)].
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Smith et al. (2022) conducted an editorial in Mental health in elite athletes. Increased knowledge exchanges between sports psychiatry and forensic psychiatry are essential to address complex medicolegal issues, such as anti-doping offenses and medical malpractice in elite sports.
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