Mental Health Performance - What Athletes Need To Know Part II. Depression, Trauma & Sports
About the Author
Ben Foodman is a licensed psychotherapist & performance specialist. He owns his private practice located in Charlotte North Carolina where he specializes in working with athletes to help them overcome mental blocks (the yips), PTSD, ADD / ADHD and achieve flow states through the techniques of Brainspotting & Neurofeedback. If you are interested in services, use the link here! Enjoy the article below!
Table Of Contents
Introduction: How Sports Psychologists Evaluate Athletes, Depression & Mental Blocks
Part I. Considerations For Sport Psychologists & Athlete Depression Symptoms
Part II. The Neuroscience Of Depression For Athletes & Sports Performance
Part III. Why Sport Psychologists Use Brainspotting To Help Athletes With Depression
Introduction: How Sports Psychologists Evaluate Athletes, Depression & Mental Blocks
When athletes are engaged in sport training and performance experiences, they want as few distractions as possible. Unfortunately, athletes will experience distractions and obstacles that prevent them from achieving their goals. One common issue that affects many athletes is depression. Most athletes come to understand depression from the traditional Sport Psychologist’s definition, but the truth is that depression is far more complex that what we have initially been told. Even worse, depression can cause athletes not only to want to quit but in some instances can be life threatening as well.
Because this is such a prevalent issue for athletes across the sports spectrum, I want to take some time to explore clinical depression. In part I. I want to review common symptoms that athletes report when experiencing depression and why this is different than overtraining syndrome. In part II. I want to review the clinical definitions of depression and the neuroscience behind this issue. Finally in part III. I want to review one of my favorite interventions to use for athlete depression. Let’s first begin by discussing common athlete symptoms.
Part I. Considerations For Sport Psychologists & Athlete Depression Symptoms
There is no shortage of stigma within the world of sports as it pertains to mental health issues that affect athletes. Unfortunately, while we have considerable data as it pertains to depression within the general population, we probably know very little about how depression specifically affects athletes due to how athletes avoid seeking mental health services because of the shame associated with using services for psychological therapy. With that being said, there are some common issues that sport psychologists can feel confident in diagnosing as depression whenever this is encountered in the sports environment.
Symptoms that athletes report include but are not limited to low motivation, low energy, excessive sleeping, feelings of sadness, substance use, hopelessness and even suicidal ideation. One very common and important area where sport psychologists and athletes report confusion is understanding the difference between depression and overtraining syndrome. Clinical depression usually has a history that is correlated with past trauma or family genetic history whereas overtraining syndrome is usually correlated with periods of intense, unbroken energy. Let’s now take some time to review the clinical diagnostic criteria and neuroscience of depression.
Part II. The Neuroscience Of Depression For Athletes & Sports Performance
Full disclaimer, I believe the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of Mental Disorders is one of the worst tools that we use to understand mental health concerns. It’s not to say that it is worthless, but unfortunately many clinicians use that as the only tool by which to understand their clients, which is a horrible approach to try and help people. With that being said, we should take a quick peak at how the DSM defines depression, as there are some important points that the DSM provides us to focus on. Per the manual, ‘Depressive disorders include disruptive mood dysregulation disorder, major depressive disorder premenstrual dysphoric disorder, substance/medication-induced depressive disorder, unspecified depressive disorder. The common feature of all of these disorders is the presence of sad, empty or irritable mood, accompanied by somatic and cognitive changes that significantly affect the individual’s capacity to function. What differs among them are issues of duration, timing or resumed etiology’. So what is the problem with trying to help athletes through this understanding of depression? The DSM diagnosis does not tell us WHY the individual is depressed. Understanding the WHY is the ultimate process that sport psychologists can use to help athletes have the best possible chance of overcoming symptoms of depression. Let’s review one of the most common possible WHY explanations: Psychological Trauma.
Depression can be considered a psychological trauma dysregulation behavior that is produced by the subcortical brain as a result of unprocessed psychological trauma. In the book The Body Keeps The Score, the author describes the neuropsychological process of how trauma affects the brain and creates the dysregulation behavior of depression, ‘the emotional brain has first dibs on interpreting incoming information. Sensory information about the environment and body state received by the eyes, ears, touch, kinesthetic sense, etc. converges on the thalamus where it is processed and then passed on to the amygdala to interpret its emotional significance. This occurs with lightning speed. If a threat is detected, the amygdala sends messages to the hypothalamus to secrete stress hormones to defend against that threat. The neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux calls this the low road. The second neural pathway, the high road, runs from the thalamus via the hippocampus and anterior cingulate, to the prefrontal cortex, the rational brain, for a conscious and much more refined interpretation. This takes several microseconds longer. If the interpretation of threat by the amygdala is too intense, and/or the filtering system from the higher areas of the brain are too weak, as often happens in PTSD, people lose control over automatic emergency response, like prolonged startle or aggressive outbursts’.
Part III. Why Sport Psychologists Use Brainspotting To Help Athletes With Depression
Sport psychologists are beginning to discover a new cutting-edge intervention that is taking the field of human performance by storm: Brainspotting. Brainspotting is a brain-based psychotherapy technique that utilizes the client’s field of vision to identify unresolved psychological issues. In Brainspotting we say ‘where you look affects how you feel’ and through this process clients have the ability to access the parts of their brain that traditional psychotherapy approaches such as cognitive behavioral therapy are unable to do. This results in clients being able to directly address the true ‘underlying’ issue (which we refer to as a Brain Spot) that has created conflict allowing individuals to move from needing to constantly cope, to not needing to cope at all.
The goal of all psychotherapy interventions are to help clients move from dysregulation to regulation. For instance if you are an athlete and you have been experiencing dysregulation behaviors, this can be considered a type of mental block. Because almost half of the brain is dedicated to vision, we use the clients field of vision combined with focused mindfulness to help engage the regions of the brain that are responsible for regulation and bypass the regions that are not! This physiological approach can help clients achieve their desired psychological outcomes. Regardless of what intervention athletes use, the most important thing athletes need to realize is that working through mental health issues is NOT a separate endeavor from sports performance, but rather is a form of human performance enhancement!
Note To Reader:
If you are an athlete reading this segment of the TRAINING REPORT, hopefully this content was helpful! I put the Training Report together because I felt like many of the discussions on issues such as the Yips/mental blocks, strength training & other subject matter on athlete performance concepts were really missing the mark on these ideas (e.g. how trauma is the direct cause of the Yips). If you are interested in learning more, make sure to subscribe below for when I put out new content on issues related to sport psychology & athlete performance! Also, if you are looking to work with a mental performance specialist, you are in the right place! USE THIS LINK to reach out to me to see if my services are the right fit for your goals!
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