Sport Psychology and Performance Psychology: Contributions to the Mental Health of Athletes

Abstract

Sport psychology and performance psychology are related and overlapping terms that encompass a broad range of interventions, applications, and areas of research. These two domains focus on the psychological aspects of performance, within sports or exercise contexts in the former, as well as expansion to non-sport areas of performance such as business, the performing arts, medicine, and the military, in the latter. Some have proposed that sport psychology is a subspecialty of performance psychology, which is seen as an umbrella term. Over a number of decades, high-performance strategies and techniques and skills, developed within sports and exercise psychology field, have been extrapolated and applied to non-sports areas with positive results. Most individuals want to perform well in life, whether it is functioning optimally at work or school or performing well within family roles or performing and/or adapting well to situations and life circumstances; thus, the work of sport and performance psychology practitioners and researchers is to understand the often complex relationships of psychological (and/or biopsychosocial) factors involved in creating positive performance outcomes and experiences. Sport psychologists and performance psychologists play important roles within sports medicine and are often the best-trained providers to deal with mental health issues in athletes. Over the years, sport psychology has expanded to be seen as “sport and exercise psychology,” to include the contributions of exercise and sport scientists to sport performance (beyond applied sport psychologists); the field continues to expand and goes beyond sports to general performance science, which focuses on areas such as the development of expertise or the cognitive neuroscience aspects of high performance. For sports medicine providers, the perceived dichotomy of clinically or counseling-trained sport psychology providers and performance enhancement consultants (with various titles) can be confusing, especially as it relates to the mental health of athletes. Clinically trained sport psychologists can provide assessment and interventions that can address diagnosable mental health disorders and the subclinical disorder symptoms such as anxiety, depression, and sleep difficulties. As a member of the sports medicine team, sport psychologists are typically the most experienced providers to deal with the psychological and emotional aspects of an athlete’s sports injury and injury recovery or rehab experience.