JOHANNESBURG - Athletes are often celebrated for their talent and ability to perform under pressure.
But when the final whistle blows, medals are handed to the winners, and the stadium lights go out, many return home carrying a burden few people ever see.
According to registered psychologist Boitumelo Mamiani, the pursuit of greatness is driven by the psychological pressure to keep winning.
Mamiani said athletes often tend to strive to be the best or even perfect, but the sad reality is that perfection does not exist in the world, and the pursuit of that can be detrimental.
“Thriving for it may feel redundant on one level and exhausting because you want to put yourself in a position to be the best at something. That takes a lot of mental resolve to achieve that, and physiologically, it creates a lot of anxiety.
Often, athletes choose to suppress these feelings through performance, but once that thrill crashes, it takes an emotional toll on them.
“They face a lot of shame and guilt for the many things they can’t do,” Mamiani added.
According to a study on developing the field of sport and exercise psychiatry in South Africa in 2023, mental health symptoms and disorders occur in former and current elite athletes at similar rates to those of the general population.
It further revealed that mental health disorders develop where a genetic predisposition meets environmental factors, such as trauma, stress, or substance misuse.
The study echoed Mamiani’s words that athletes are people who experience personal stressors and additional pressures of being an elite athlete, bringing him to the concept of “off-field pressures”.
“External pressure will always be there, but the ones that are in sports are particularly unique because sports careers are short and competitive. It is easy for teams to dispose of someone because their performance is not at the level that the team or manager believes it should be at," he said
Mamiani made an example of contractual obligations.
While they reward the hard work of an athlete, he said, they can become very harmful to players because someone would want to base their performance on the fact that they could potentially lose something.
There are also high-risk periods, which include career transitions, athletes retiring with no clear idea of what to do with their lives, high-profile international competitions, or even social media pressure.
"When people start spotting imperfections in players, they magnify that rather than the qualities of the players. This is attributed to negative reinforcement."
When stress and anxiety build, people naturally look for coping mechanisms and unfortunately, those are not always healthy.
In shifting his attention to substance abuse, Mamiani said research has pointed out that people turn to substances because it provided temporary solutions to emotional challenges.
But the reality is that they are temporary.
“Substances create even more problems and are not a solution. Athletes are driven to these things because they want quick fixes.”
Miamane said teammates, coaches, and family members should pay close attention to the warning signs such as social withdrawal, changes in behavior and poor performance.
Beyond looking at the warning signs, he also makes a list of practical initiatives that can be taken to put the mental health of athletes first.
This, he said, included involving mental health practitioners, psychiatrists, and psychologists as part of the support structure in team sport, but also training management on how they can manage mental health difficulties that do come up in big tournaments when they come up.