Prolonging the Mental Health Moment: Sport, Media, and the Advancement of a More Authentic Athlete

Abstract

Ask most attuned to issues in the sports world as to whether mental health has experienced a “moment” in the past decade, and nearly all would likely say yes. Defining that moment is much more difficult to pinpoint as that depends on one’s location and sport interest type. For soccer fans, perhaps it was Italian goalkeeper Gianluigi Buffon’s admission that he once missed a match because of a panic attack. Others might point to Indian cricket captain Virat Kohli, who disclosed that the pressure of playing at the game was a serious issue with profound implications on his own mental health. Swimming afficionados likely focus on record-setting American Olympian Michael Phelps, who not only revealed depression and suicidal ideation but also then created a foundation and a film to show he was not alone with these experiences. In more recent years, women have started to speak about it more, including leaders in their sports such as Japanese tennis star Naomi Osaka or American gymnast Simone Biles. Was sport experiencing a mental health moment—or was it something bigger than that? A sequence, an ascending understanding, a progression of insight all ultimately seem more apt. The key for sports media researchers now pertains to discernment, including in how to examine a multitude of stories under the same broad mental health umbrella. Communication & Sport has gradually been entering scholarship into these types of debates, mostly within the National Basketball Association. For instance, Cassilo (2022) contrasted the cases of NBA players RoyceWhite and DeMar DeRozan, finding media coverage was almost universally positive for DeRozan, yet much more critical of White, at least partly because his mental health disclosure was seen as impeding his ability to travel and compete with his team and at least partly because DeRozan was more athletically successful than White. Parrott et al. (2021) compared DeRozan with