Kweku’s Korner
By Emmett L. Gill, Jr., PhD, MSW, LCSW
Founder, AthleteTalk
1(833) 4-ATHTALK
“Changing the game of mental health in sports!”
Emmett L. Gill, Jr.
Athlete Talk is a mental health app specifically made for athletes. AthleteTalk was created in 2021, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, to provide athletes with a mental health resource that they could access on their phone. AthleteTalk includes almost 100 plans and over 2,000 pieces of psychoeducation posts, a friend’s feature, a leaderboard, and more. Just imagine Instagram with all the athlete mental health content!
Although we are five years removed from COVID, mental health apps are still viable resources for athletes – especially college athletes. Athletes still face time management due to academics, practices, games, and life- so meeting with a provider is not always feasible. Further, many counseling centers are not equipped to provide athletes with providers who understand their lived experience. What makes an app even more relevant is that only 10% to 15% of athletes seek help when they need it, so what resources are available for the other 85% to 90% of athletes with mental health challenges?
So, why aren’t digital mental health resources utilized by more athletic departments?
First, there are fair number of Division One athletic departments that still do not have in-house or embedded mental health providers. While some of the more lucrative athletic departments may have several mental health providers, a meaningful number rely on university counseling centers. Not only are university counseling centers backlogged, but athletes also prefer to keep their mental health status private! Still, whether an athletic department has an in-house or embedded provider, the clinician-to-athlete ratio is typically one clinician for every 100 college athletes and oftentimes more like one clinician for every 200 college athletes.
Outside of providing college athletes with mental health providers, it’s hard to say whether athletic departments have the bandwidth to utilize additional resources like an app. Many have the financial capacity to afford digital mental health resources, but using them is another story. It takes work to get athletes to try and consistently use mental health apps. Yet, the benefits are that mental health apps allow mental health providers to “meet” their athletes in other “places” besides crises. Apps can be essential in breaking down stigmas and increasing athletes mental health literacy, which increases the likelihood that athletes will seek help when needed. On the other hand, what about the athletic departments with two, three, or more mental health providers – why don’t they use digital mental health resources?
Simply put, “some” college sports mental health providers refrain from utilizing resources outside of talk therapy because they have not been trained to do anything else but therapy.
Then there are those mental health providers in college sports who want to be the “be all end” all when it comes to their athletes’ mental health.
When providing an AthleteTalk demo for one provider, they said as much by sharing, “I don’t have our athletes do anything outside of meeting with me”. I simply wondered what their athletes did to improve their mental health for the other 167 hours of the week.
If we truly want to help athletes navigate their mental health, then mental health providers must check their egos and our ethics and make sure we are using every available resource to improve athlete mental health!