No Crying in Tennis – Mental Health in the Sports Workplace

Sports and Mental Illness are Not Mutually Exclusive 

I don’t know much about Naomi Osaka but have seen many opinionated reactions to her decision to prioritize her mental health. For those who don’t know, she dropped out of the French Open after she declined to participate in media interviews to protect her mental health. And while many people have shown their support for her, others have judged the decision negatively and publicly. That’s because the public can actually see the effects of her decision, because she found the requirements to interact with the media mentally unhealthy.

In most other industries, a decision to change tasks at work for mental health reasons wouldn’t make it to the public’s radar, but Naomi Osaka is a public figure and she plays SPORTS. 🎾 That makes this a different ballgame. I can see you cringe at the pun; it’s ok.

She’s a public figure and people watch her play and they got used to hearing her interviews with the media. People enjoy hearing what she has to say, and she gets paid to do it, for crying out loud! She needs to realize this is part of her job. This is different.

This is different. That’s what I keep hearing people say when they explain how it’s possible for them to advocate for mental health and still not support Naomi Osaka, her decision, and her message. It’s different because it’s sports. And it’s part of her job. 

But it’s not different because it’s sports. And saying that something is part of someone’s job doesn’t excuse requiring someone to do something that’s directly damaging to their mental health. Also, doing damage to someone’s mental performance is detrimental to their physical performance too, for everyone claiming it should be all about the game and that she needs team spirit and to toughen up.

Sports and mental health challenges aren’t mutually exclusive though, and “coach talk” may not be the appropriate tone to use when dealing with more sensitive issues. “Get back in the game” is not a successful mental health approach. And mental health isn’t a game, and it doesn’t become one just because somebody is playing a game. And if playing a game is someone’s job, it shouldn’t be treated differently from other jobs. There’s no asterisk next to professional sports that says “this industry doesn’t have to care about mental health.” 

Mental illness doesn’t skip over athletes and move through their “weaker” counterparts. Athletes don’t automatically handle mental health better. We can’t deprive them of a mentally healthy work environment. They didn’t sign up for it by choosing to play sports.

The teachers of my mental health first aid course played a video where an athlete dealing with mental health challenges related to PTSD lashed out on her teammates and behaved erratically, almost causing injuries. Her coach confronted her and attempted to talk to her about the issue the way she probably would have discussed a sports issue.

She told her that her abuser wasn’t there and she needed to get her head back in the game and that dwelling on the past was messing up her focus on the game. The coach tried to be there for her, but it didn’t seem to work. I definitely didn’t think it worked and the teachers didn’t seem to either.

But people in my class had different reactions.

One person said “Wow! I couldn’t believe how rude the coach was.”

Another opined “I thought she was just talking like a coach. I didn’t think anything was wrong with it, it’s coach talk.”

And that’s what I keep thinking of when I see people debating about Naomi Osaka.

Harsh language rarely helps in a mental health challenge. Telling someone to get over it and stop irrationally imagining their abuser coming back into their lives may seem like reasonable advice to someone not dealing with the situation. To the person with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder who cannot help reliving her trauma, that type of language might be the twist of the knife an already deep cut didn’t need. The same words meant to help end up making the situation worse. They make the person dealing with the mental health challenge regret opening up about it. 

The person with the mental health challenge learns to keep it inside. 

The coach who unintentionally exacerbated the situation when she confronted someone on the team about her behavior learns to stay out of it.

But those lessons don’t contribute to the goal of creating mentally healthy workplaces. Neither does the public tendency to criticize public figures when they publicly choose to prioritize their mental health at work. Two days after Mental Health Awareness Month and some of the same people who advocated for employees wellbeing for the past 31 days are declaring Naomi Osaka’s choice unacceptable. But that’s unacceptable and we need to do better.