To Flourish or Languish, that is the question: Exploring the mental health profiles of Danish elite athletes

Gender differences in mental health symptoms and risk factors in Australian elite athletes

“…Our results are consistent with existing evidence that women athletes tend to report higher levels of MHS, [3][4][5] though in our sample, the proportions meeting threshold for 'caseness' were somewhat similar. Women reported experiencing a range of ALEs at higher rates, However, due to the low proportion of athletes reporting a non-heterosexual orientation, we combined these responses in order to maintain confidentiality and limit the potential for identification of participants given the high profile sample.…”

“…Limited attention has been paid to the role of gender in athlete mental health 1 despite this being a major differentiating factor for rates across the general population. 2 While recent studies have reported higher rates of mental health symptoms (MHS) in women athletes, [3][4][5] our understanding of factors that contribute to this is incomplete. Additional to obstacles many women commonly face at work, 6 women athletes may also experience stressors such as negative or sexualised perceptions of their body, 7 unwanted social media messaging 8 and financial difficulty.…”

Let's Talk About Mental Health and Mental Disorders in Elite Sports: A Narrative Review of Theoretical Perspectives

“…Moreover, the progress of wellbeing research in sports and other fields of psychology has been limited by a lack of sound measures for assessing well-being (Lundqvist, 2011;Cooke et al, 2016;Linton et al, 2016;Giles et al, 2020). Several sport psychology scholars have nevertheless explicitly studied well-being as a defined target construct of mental health (e.g., Lundqvist, 2011;Lundqvist and Sandin, 2014;Lundqvist and Raglin, 2015;Macdougall et al, 2016Macdougall et al, , 2019Kuettel and Larsen, 2020) and well-being is increasingly adopted as an indicator of positive mental health in studies (e.g., Kuettel et al, 2021;McLoughlin et al, 2021). In general, well-being studies have searched for empirical knowledge that can give rise to strategies to maintain, protect, or increase athletes' wellbeing, both in sports and in life.…”

“…The importance of psychological health among elite athletes was most likely first introduced into the sport psychology literature by Morgan ( 1985 ), who suggested the Mental Health Model of sports performance, in which psychopathology was examined by means of personality and mood assessments (see also Raglin, 2001 ). In more recent years, well-being, mental health symptoms, and mental disorders among elite athletes have attracted the interest of researchers (e.g., Lundqvist, 2011 ; Lundqvist and Raglin, 2015 ; Gouttebarge et al, 2019 ; Reardon et al, 2019 ; Kuettel and Larsen, 2020 ; Kuettel et al, 2021 ). Due to the widespread use of the construct of mental health in the sport psychology literature, prominent theoretical models, and orientations will be reviewed below to illuminate the wide scope of meanings that may be attached to this construct.…”

“…Similar complexities in interpretations of mental health and mental ill-being continuums were reported by Durand-Bush et al ( 2015 ), who found that athletes reported low mental health functioning and moderate levels of stress but also moderate levels of self-regulation capacity and moderately high psychological well-being, suggesting a positive adjustment. Adopting the dual-continuum model as a theoretical framework, Kuettel et al ( 2021 ) performed latent profile analysis to identify mental health profiles based on athletes, anxiety, depression, and well-being scores. In a sample of 612 Danish elite athletes, the majority (64.2%) of the athletes were profiled as flourishing, approximately a third (29.3%) as having a moderate mental health profile, and a minority of the sample (6.5%) as languishing.…”