The IOC wants every elite athlete screened for mental health, and says sport, not just the athlete, is responsible
A new International Olympic Committee consensus statement, written by 31 experts including people with lived experience, calls for routine screening, rehearsed emergency plans and support through injury and retirement.
Mental ill health is common among elite athletes, and responsibility for preventing and treating it lies with the whole of elite sport, not with athletes alone. That is the central message of a new consensus statement from the International Olympic Committee (IOC), published in August in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.
“Elite athletes experience mental health symptoms and disorders at rates similar to, or higher than, the general population,” the statement says.
Who wrote it
The statement updates the IOC’s first consensus on athlete mental health, published in 2019. It was written by an international panel of 31 people with lived, clinical and scientific expertise, drawing together the current evidence across ten topic areas: from detection and treatment to social media, injury, cultural considerations and mental health emergencies.
What it recommends
The panel makes ten core recommendations. Among them:
- Routine screening. Sports organisations should screen athletes’ mental health with validated tools at set points in the season and after significant events.
- Emergency plans. Every elite sport setting should have a mental health emergency plan, with defined roles and escalation routes, and should rehearse and review it.
- Injury. Athletes’ psychological response to injury should be assessed routinely, and return to sport should prioritise safety and stability, not just physical readiness.
- Transitions. Athletes need targeted support before, during and after major transitions. Difficult transitions out of sport are strongly associated with mental health symptoms and disorders.
- Para athletes and adolescents. Care should address disability-specific stressors and classification, and the developmental needs of young athletes.
- Coaches and staff. Coaches, support staff and health professionals should receive mental health education suited to their roles.
The statement also calls on sport to tackle stigma, confidentiality concerns and athletes’ fear of being deselected if they ask for help.
The ecosystem argument
An accompanying editorial by Dr Brian Hainline of New York University and colleagues stresses that point: mental health in elite sport is “an ecosystem issue rather than one borne solely by athletes”. The editorial also notes a substantial mental health burden among coaches and medical staff.
“This consensus provides a roadmap; our hope is that leadership, accountability, and sustained investment will follow,” the editorial says.
Beyond the Olympics
The recommendations are written for elite sport, but the ideas travel. Age-group triathletes and club runners are not screened by a national federation, yet many of the same pressures apply: injury, the loss of identity when a racing career ends, and the strain of combining hard training with work and family. The statement’s emphasis on wellbeing as a continuum (something that can change, not a fixed state) applies to anyone who trains seriously.
