We’ve all heard about the diets and fitness regimens that keep athletes in fighting shape, but how do those same figures keep their mental health in check?
has estimated that 35% of professional athletes experience problems with their mental health, facing everything from eating disorders and burnout to depression and anxiety—but they’re not often discussed on the world’s largest stages, especially not by players at the top of their careers.
Over the last 30 years, it’s been rather more common for athletes to describe their mood disorders or bouts of mental illness after their retirement, when certain public and professional pressures had eased. The former NHL goaltender Clint Malarchuk is one example: In 2019, he described the symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder that followed a horrific game-time injury in 1989.
In 2007, the former Olympic ice skater Dorothy Hamill—who had a long history of depression in her family—that mental illness had dogged her throughout her career. “When you have that goal and you have that dream and it actually happens, you think that it would be a switch,” she said, “and that all of a sudden you’d feel, you know, like an Olympic champion. And I didn’t feel any different.
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