How to Talk About Mental Wellness With Your Athletes

 

Talking with your athletes about their mental wellbeing will provide them with the tools they need to be healthy people and athletes. Here are five valuable tips from a child and adolescent psychiatric physician to help you start the conversation on mental wellness with your athlete.

It can be a daunting task, speaking to your athletes about mental wellness. It’s a sensitive topic and one that can’t be tackled lightly. Knowing that, psychiatrist Dr. David Conant-Norville, MD, shares some valuable tools and tips on how to start the conversation about mental well-being with your athlete, and how to keep those conversations moving forward.

Understand that mental wellness starts now

“Mental wellness includes all of the processes that go on in your brain — thinking, emotions, behavior, relationship processing. There’s a lot going on. The idea of mental wellness is optimizing, being free of disease. We want to talk about mental wellness in order to help prevent mental illness,” he adds. “We shouldn’t start the conversation after there’s already a problem, we want people to be mentally well.”