Clinical Round Table 15 - Psychopathology in Athletes: Strategies for Prevention, Treatment, and Wellbeing

The primary aim of this clinical roundtable is to explicate creative cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) strategies that can optimally address the mental health of athletes – broadly defined as individuals who regularly engage in movement. Athletes have extremely varied individual- and system-level experiences. As such, many are at increased risk for psychiatric conditions, most commonly anxiety and related disorders, depression and suicidality, and eating disorders. Growing calls to improve culture and intervention pathways within sport contexts highlight a need to not only assess and treat psychopathology, but also to prevent these negative outcomes and promote athlete wellbeing. Prevention and treatment of psychiatric challenges in such a diverse population is necessary and yet particularly challenging when delivered generically given that sport contexts are often high-pressure and demanding of time. When considering tailored adaptations to optimize CBT for unique athlete populations, individual traits and cognitive-behavioral processes that may contribute to psychopathology can be leveraged via various CBT techniques to support positive treatment outcomes (e.g., performance-based self-worth may also motivate active treatment engagement). An important consideration to address is that, for many athletes, mental health stigma contributes to reduced treatment seeking, engagement, and retention. The panelists will discuss how CBT interventions can target commonly evidenced symptoms (e.g., rigid thinking) and increase engagement (e.g., challenging beliefs associated with poor mental health vulnerability) in highly diverse athlete populations. Panelists, who are widely experienced in clinical psychology and athletics, will reference current knowledge of CBT interventions for athletes, provide tangible skill-building to apply in clinical practice, and suggest future directions for needed treatment and prevention efforts.